Data Integration
With MarkLogic 9, the company is placing particular emphasis on data integration, said Joe Pasqua, executive vice president of product strategy, MarkLogic. To do this, he noted, “We are really focusing on the notion of the semantics of data, and the idea there is that if you want to bring data together, you have to know what it means.”
Supporting data integration, the new release introduces Entity Services to enable developers to give their data meaning using a semantic model of the key concepts (entities) and the relationships between them, and to allow organizations to access disparate data from multiple sources faster. This is a fundamental new capability for MarkLogic that will be expanded in the future, noted Pasqua.
In addition, the new Optic API provides a new query mechanism that allows developers to combine documents, triples, and rows for flexibility to join across entities, preform aggregations, and project data in different lenses, or views. Queries using the Optic API leverage a new underlying index and distributed execution across a cluster that is transparent to users, said Pasqua. “The Optic API is going to add to the power of dealing with entities.”
The Optic API and the new index also enhance MarkLogic’s SQL implementation. While MarkLogic is a NoSQL database, Pasqua said, MarkLogic has a SQL query API. “The work that we are doing in MarkLogic 9 is going to enhance our SQL capabilities. That is important for our customers because we need to give them a bridge from the relational world to the next generation of databases.
Security
MarkLogic 9 also introduces an advanced encryption capability that protects data from hackers and insider threats using standards-based cryptography, advanced key management, and granular separation of duties.
“We are moving the encryption capability right into the core of MarkLogic,” said Pasqua. “We are also adding very granular separation of duties between the DBA and the security administrator over how keys are managed.”
New redaction capabilities also eliminate the exposure of sensitive information such as Social Security numbers by either removing that existing information or replacing it with other values. And finally, Element-Level Security allows specific elements or properties of XML and JSON documents to be hidden from particular users, providing even more specific security controls than the document-level security that already exists in the MarkLogic database.
Manageability
The last major theme area for MarkLogic 9, said Pasqua, is manageability. The new release adds enhancements to improve the customer experience by delivering easier and proactive administration that increases staff productivity and agility.
To that end, MarkLogic Ops Director, a new GUI-based tool, has been added to provide a single pane of glass that helps DBAs monitor, manage, optimize across multiple clusters, across cloud and on-premises, and across production, test and development environments. The addition of a Rolling Upgrade capability also lets administrators upgrade MarkLogic clusters without downtime, and is part of MarkLogic’s philosophy of non-disruptive operations, said Pasqua. “It means that people never even have to take planned downtime with MarkLogic. It is really important for our customers who need to be up all the time.” And, finally, telemetry will help MarkLogic to proactively discover, fix and alert customers to potential issues.
Since its $102 million funding round in May 2015, the MarkLogic has been driving expansion globally with a concentration on key verticals, including healthcare, financial services, government, military intelligence, and media and publishing, according to Pasqua.
“Virtually all of the new things that we add in MarkLogic are the result of input from customers,” said Pasqua. “We focus on the enterprise and on mission-critical apps. They tend to have the hardest problems so they force us to push the envelope on what the database can do.”
For more information about MarkLogic and the database, visit www.marklogic.com.