Frequently Asked Questions

MarkLogic solves complex data problems. Almost every organization is facing challenges in managing and getting value from data because of data and knowledge silos. Our platform eliminates the effect of these silos and delivers data agility by coupling data with its meaning and definitions. It integrates many capabilities into a single data resource eliminating the risk and complexity of an integration-centric approach that involves technologies sourced from many different vendors.

Simply put, the main reason customers use MarkLogic products is to change the way they work with information. What MarkLogic delivers is data agility – the ability to make nimble changes to any aspect of working with any information at any scale for any purpose, with speed and ease. The platform integrates data with everything you know about that data and what it means. This enhances existing investments in data systems with the ability to respond to business change quickly. For specific examples of the benefits of MarkLogic products, please visit our customer section.

MarkLogic Data Hub is a unified solution for integrating and managing your multi-structured data. It works by ingesting data from any source, indexing it for immediate query and search, and curating it through a process of harmonization, mastering, and enrichment. It is powered by MarkLogic Server and can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud.

MarkLogic Data Hub Central is the UI for MarkLogic Data Hub. It provides a collaborative, self-service experience for agile teams to build and test a data hub using MarkLogic’s iterative, model-driven data integration process. It makes it simple to integrate and curate a variety of data into durable data assets for operational and analytical use cases. Users get an always-on, real-time view of their data hub as they configure and run curation services to harmonize and master the data, and share fit-for-purpose data with complete security and governance.

MarkLogic Server is an enterprise-grade multi-model database. It is designed with both modern NoSQL and trusted enterprise capabilities to power transactional, operational, and analytical applications. It natively handles document data, semantic graph data, and geospatial data. You can also create relational views on top of the document model for SQL analytics. This all happens with a unified back-end that has built-in search, granular security controls, distributed ACID transactions, and more. These capabilities make it the best database to power a data hub.

MarkLogic Data Hub offers a simpler, more agile approach to data integration than any other data integration and data management platform. Here’s why:

• Fast pipelines vs waiting on complex ETL— MarkLogic Data Hub ingests raw data as is, relying on its multi-model approach to handle any incoming data sources. This is in contrast to other platforms that require upfront data modeling and ETL, which can take months or years.
• One unified platform vs many tools bolted together— The MarkLogic Data Hub architecture is simple and holistic. It combines a multi-model database, full-text search, data ingestion tools, data harmonization and mastering capabilities, machine learning, and application services all within a single unified platform. To build a similar architecture with open source components or services offered by the cloud vendors, you would have to bolt together up to a dozen different things.
• Agile data curation vs waterfall approach— With MarkLogic Data Hub, users curate data iteratively. Users start with the business question, then define the necessary data service required. Then, only the data that is required for that initial data service is curated. As more data services are defined, more data is curated. This is very different from the old, “big bang” approach that required all data to be modeled and curated in advance.
• Serious enterprise-grade security vs “check the box” security— MarkLogic has always taken security very seriously. MarkLogic Data Hub was designed from the start to handle the mission-critical use cases. When it comes to data integration, this means full data lineage tracking and audit capabilities, granular role-based access control, advanced encryption, and more. The benefit is that you can really trust MarkLogic with important data assets, and you actually improve the shareability of those assets because they are better governed.
• Straightforward development vs requiring new skills— First, MarkLogic Data Hub uses industry-standard APIs and programming languages and has easy integrations so that it plugs into existing environments. Second, it is designed so that developers can think of data as objects, not just rows and columns (though it does support standard SQL). This means there is no disconnect between applications that consume data as objects and the data layer. The sum of these benefits is that developers find MarkLogic easier and more natural to work with.

Broadly speaking, MarkLogic is used to make high-quality, unified, contextualized data available for immediate use by informed search, contextual applications, grounded analytics and facts-based intelligence.. The platform can be configured as a semantic knowledge graph, a data hub, or metadata management.

As it applies to solving your business problems, this can take shape across many use cases. Often, it means using MarkLogic as an integration hub to build a reliable 360° view of a thing that’s important to your business, across many disconnected data sources – whether that “thing” be a customer you are serving, a product you are manufacturing, a program whose effectiveness you are evaluating, a claim or transaction you are processing, a person you are investigating, or any other entity of interest. MarkLogic is also great to use for regulatory compliance reporting, agile data governance, and for metadata and content catalogs – or as a data platform for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. .

MarkLogic is used in industries throughout the public and private sectors, including Financial Services, Insurance, Pharma, Manufacturing, Media (Publishing and Entertainment), National Security, and Government. All of these industries have complex data requirements and have experienced significant disruption requiring them to make better use of existing and new data sources – while ensuring their integrated data is reliable and secure.

We are a data platform company, not an application software company. That said, our solutions engineers and consultants can work with you to develop the applications that your business needs or to serve up integrated data to applications you already use, like BI tools or GIS.

MarkLogic Server is licensed as proprietary software with Essential Enterprise subscription licenses for 8-core packs for deployment in customer data centers or in a public cloud. Customers can also purchase Essential Enterprise licenses directly through the public cloud marketplaces on AWS or Microsoft Azure. For developers, who want to get started immediately, MarkLogic also offers a free, full-featured Developer Edition.

Customers who license MarkLogic Server get MarkLogic Data Hub software free of charge.

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Enterprises need a database that supports more than just a single data model to unlock the value from all of their data in an efficient manner. A multi-model database combines the benefits of graph, document, geospatial, and relational models into a single, scalable, high-performance operational database. It creates integrated indexes and provides a unified query interface to securely access multiple types of data.

As a multi-model database, MarkLogic Server natively stores JSON, XML, text, geospatial, semantic triples and binaries (e.g. PDFs, videos) in one unified platform. This ability to store and query document data, location data, semantic graph data, and build relational views for SQL analytics results in unprecedented flexibility and agility when integrating data from silos.

Yes, MarkLogic Server natively stores JSON documents. You can ingest JSON and other documents without worrying about schema complexity.

In addition, you can use RDF Triples to enrich JSON documents with semantic metadata (or ontologies) or connect JSON documents to build a knowledge graph. This is important for performing semantic search queries to explore relationships and make new inferences, and also for data integration.

Also, unlike other document databases, MarkLogic Server has built-in search to index all of the data at ingest time so that users can do immediate data discovery.

MarkLogic Server has had ACID transactions since its first version, allowing users to build operational and transactional applications. MarkLogic Server’s ACID properties are highly scalable across large clusters and apply to multi-document transactions, multi-statement transactions, and XA transactions (i.e. transactions between clusters). While standard in relational databases, ACID transactions differentiate MarkLogic Server from other NoSQL databases, providing the unique reliability to run large-scale operational systems for mission-critical use cases.

Built-in search is extremely useful for both data integration and application development. MarkLogic Server provides sophisticated indexing capabilities that reduce the time and effort to build and configure indexes for standard queries, and do not require a bolt-on search engine for full-text search like other databases. This enables users to immediately search and discover any new data loaded into MarkLogic Server, and also keep track of data as it is harmonized. Users can leverage search when building both transactional and analytical applications that require powerful queries (like geospatial, semantic) to be run efficiently, and when building Google-like, full-text search features into an application.

MarkLogic Server achieves HA/DR using a shared-nothing architecture that provides redundancy for failover and high-performance scaling to ensure that your data is always available.

• Shared nothing architecture has no master-slave relationships, eliminating any single point of failure.
• MarkLogic Server has point-in-time recovery and ACID transactions to ensure full redundancy and consistency
• Changes do not require a server restart (re-indexing, adding nodes, or changing configurations)
• Database replication between sites is secured with SSL out-of-the-box
• Incremental backups consume less storage and can be completed quickly

MarkLogic Server runs some of the biggest NoSQL systems in the world. It is trusted by large investment banks, major healthcare organizations, and classified government systems to securely integrate their most critical data assets. It is a massively parallel processing database that scales horizontally in clusters on commodity hardware to hundreds of nodes, petabytes of data, and billions of documents—and still processes tens of thousands of transactions per second. When demand dissipates, MarkLogic Server can scale back down without having to worry about complex sharding. Organizations can easily run large scale web applications and handle incredible volumes of data on MarkLogic Server.

MarkLogic provides flexible deployment options. You can deploy MarkLogic Server either on-premises or in the cloud.

MarkLogic Server handles both operational and transactional workloads, at scale, in a single database. This is possible because it provides modern NoSQL capabilities and trusted enterprise capabilities like flexible data model, ACID transactions, full-text search, real-time alerts, SQL analytics, and more. You can easily build transactional applications and perform real-time operational analytics.

MarkLogic Server is a proprietary software but provides a free developer’s license. This gives developers the ability to download and install the full capabilities of MarkLogic Server and get going in a few minutes. MarkLogic also makes some of its projects open source.

In general, MarkLogic’s philosophy is to build a proprietary core that uses open standards and provide open source connectors and APIs for easy integration into existing environments and ecosystems. This results in an open data platform with zero vendor lock-in and helps create a sustainable business model.

MarkLogic Server is licensed in 8-core packs for on-premises or cloud deployment. The number of licenses is determined based on the infrastructure, data volume, and your intended goals. MarkLogic Sales can help you optimize your licensing options.

Are you interested in more information about MarkLogic products or to get a quote?

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Yes. Any of the MarkLogic Server additional options that are available can be bought at any time. For example, if a customer starts with no options, but wants to add Semantics later on, that is okay.

Yes. There are many projects that have a mix of resources, including MarkLogic consultants and a mix of one or more other partners. We have a large number of other organizations that we’ve worked with and have experience using MarkLogic.

See Preferred Service Partners

Every consulting engagement is different. There are many factors that are important to consider: Existing experience with MarkLogic, how many data sources there are to be loaded, desired timeline, ongoing enhancements, and budget or contract vehicle in place. In general, our goal is to partner with customers and act as an enabler so that a customer can, as soon as possible, take the training wheels off and be successful on their own with MarkLogic. But, each project is unique and should be discussed so that we can tailor resourcing needs to your business goals.

Yes. Sometimes seeing is believing and customers want us to prove that our technology works with their data and environment to solve their particular business challenge. We enjoy showing off our technology and can work with you to scope a proof-of-concept to your needs. Learn more about our consulting Quick Start Services.

In general, the hourly billing rate for MarkLogic consultants is in line with the industry average. For each project, MarkLogic will work with you to understand the factors that can affect overall costs such as the number of data sources, amount of data harmonization required, application requirements, the level of your team’s involvement, and other factors that determine the overall cost.

Yes. Our consultants work with many government organizations, particularly in the U.S., that require active security clearances.

Yes. After completing training and working on a project to gain some real-world experience we recommend that MarkLogic Professionals validate their expertise by earning the MarkLogic Professional Certification.

MarkLogic offers certification programs for developers and administrators. Earning the certification requires the successful completion of a written exam followed by the successful completion of a hands-on project-based exam.

A developer who is completely new to MarkLogic technology can complete the core MarkLogic Developer track in just four days.

And to make it even easier and more convenient to learn MarkLogic, we offer training through both scheduled online training events and self-paced training so that developers can have flexible learning options available to them.

This enables the learner to focus on getting trained while also ensuring they have time to dedicate to their normal job responsibilities.

MarkLogic has 250k active users who visit our developer site, explore the docs, take MarkLogic courses, contribute to tools, and download our products.

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