NoSQL database provider MarkLogic has launched MarkLogic 9, which adds new data integration, security and manageability capabilities.
This is the largest and most ambitious release in MarkLogic’s history, according to Joe Pasqua, executive vice president, products, of MarkLogic.
Security
A key area of focus in MarkLogic 9 is secure sharing of information so that organizations can leverage their data assets in a governed manner.
“We have always been focused on security but we are seeing a conflict,” said Pasqua. “The whole point that enterprises are trying to achieve with big data and data in general is sharing it and leveraging it so that it can be used for it for new revenue opportunities and to improve processes. There is a tremendous desire for more sharing of data but at the same time there is a countervailing force stemming from a desire to lock down data to avoid a breach or misuse. Those two requirements are at loggerheads, and a big piece of what we are doing with Marklogic 9 is dealing with that issue to make data more sharable with more people but at the same time keep it secure.”
The new release provides advanced encryption to protect data from hackers and insider threats using standards-based cryptography, advanced key management and granular separation of duties. Element-level security also goes beyond the existing document-level security to allow specific elements of a document to be completely hidden from particular users. The increased granularity means greater data protection. In addition, redaction eliminates the exposure of sensitive information, such as Social Security numbers, by removing specific information or replacing it with other values that appear consistently to prevent leakage of sensitive data and keep it regulatory compliant, but still allow the data to be useful for proper correlation of information and insights. “That enables more sharing than you would have been able to do previously,” said Pasqua.
Time to Results
MarkLogic 9 also introduces capabilities that further facilitate and ease the integration of data from silos, said Pasqua.
Entity Services being introduced in MarkLogic 9 allows organizations to manage messy, ever-changing data sources by allowing them to define and evolve a model and vocabulary that harmonizes real-world entities, such as customers and products, and the relationships between them. “This means application or service developers can always go to a single place to understand what their entities are and what they mean,” said Pasqua. “That also means that when you are doing things like redaction later on you have got a concrete source to go back to and gain information about which fields are PII and need to be redacted. It lets the right people do the right job.”
In addition, Optic is a new API that lets developers view their data as documents, graphs, or rows, providing flexibility and efficiency. “We call it that because you can view the same data through different lenses,” said Pasqua. “The nice thing is that it is all the same underlying data. It is just different views.”
Cost of Operations
As people are building more applications, bigger clusters, geographically replicated data, the job of operating these systems is becoming more challenging, said Pasqua. “They have bigger and bigger footprints and the concern is how to make them more manageable.”
MarkLogic 9 enhances manageability and productivity with new tools, new monitoring, and enhancements for non-disruptive operations.
Ops Director is a new tool that provides “a single pane of glass” to ease management for system administrators across multiple clusters, cloud and on-premises systems, and production, test and development environments. “This is a foundational technology that we are releasing in MarkLogic 9 and you will see us adding more capabilities to it over time and it will be decoupled from our releases,” said Pasqua.
In addition, another feature in the area of manageability and productivity is Telemetry, an opt-in feature that enables better and faster support by collecting, encrypting, and sending diagnostic system-level information to MarkLogic so it is there immediately when needed. The idea is that if a customer has an issue and calls MarkLogic support, the team will already have the information to help the customer more quickly and, over time, MarkLogic will be able to be more proactive, said Pasqua.
And finally, the new release also provides rolling upgrades, said Pasqua. “This means that even while you are upgrading, you don’t have to disrupt your operations.”
There are hundreds of new features in this release, said Pasqua, “but the security, doubling down on faster time to results, and bringing the down cost of operations and optimizing uptime -- those are the big areas in MarkLogic 9.”
For more information, visit www.marklogic.com/what-is-marklogic/what-new.