News

MarkLogic Cites Developer Benefits in NoSQL Upgrade

• By David Ramel
• February 10, 2015

Enterprise NoSQL database platform vendor MarkLogic Corp. cited "massive enhancements for developers" in the latest version of its flagship database.

MarkLogic 8 combines the advantages of NoSQL data stores -- commonly associated with Big Data analytics -- with relational features found in more traditional RDBMS systems, the company said. It further differentiates its NoSQL offering with built-in capabilities for advanced queries, search, semantics and other operational and transactional functionality.

In courting developers, MarkLogic cited the heavy use of JavaScript, which now can be used on the server via an embedded runtime using Google's V8 engine or in the middle tier with a new Node.js driver for non-blocking, asynchronous input/output.

"The API provides an asynchronous JavaScript interface for key MarkLogic capabilities, such as search, document management, batch loading, transactions, aggregates and alerting," the company said. "Combined with MarkLogic's ability to index and manage JSON documents natively, the Node.js Client API is an ideal tool for full-stack JavaScript development."

Of course, developers can take advantage of other programming languages also, and can now work with a new Java Client API providing out-of-the-box data management, query capabilities, aggregation and alerting, the company said.

Also highlighting the new release are bitemporal capabilities, which allow rewinding through time-stamped files to discover changes, functionality useful for companies to meet regulatory and compliance requirements. And new semantics improvements help users automatically discover facts and relationships hidden within billions of triples and documents through the use of new inference capability and expanded support of the SPARQL 1.1 query language.

Finally, the company touted "a robust Management REST API, enhanced Flexible Replication, simpler out-of-the-box experience and faster backup" in its new release.

MarkLogic, noting that it has always had a free developer license, announced a limited offering of a free, one-year developer and production license for new customers running the database on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud platform.

"MarkLogic has been a strategic partner of American Psychological Association (APA) since 2006, helping us to drive revenue with improved data quality, time to market, performance and customer experience," the company quoted customer Beverly Jamison as saying. "Our testing has found that MarkLogic 8's JavaScript and native JSON support will allow us to quickly create even more advanced applications that our members will embrace, and the enhanced semantics will add another layer of search- and presentation-intelligence that will help us maintain our competitive advantage."