Strata Recap: The Data-centered Data Center

After hearing that MarkLogic has been around since 2001, people coming by our booth at the Strata Conference in Santa Clara couldn’t help but wonder how on earth they didn’t know about this database that can do so much.

It’s because we were NoSQL before NoSQL was cool… so now that it is cool, MarkLogic is getting attention. Besides the fun fact that we were one of the first in the NoSQL space, another plus to being around that long is that we are tried and true. MarkLogic is a hardened database. It takes a while for databases to iron out the kinks and prove themselves — which clients like JPMorgan Chase and Citi (as well as government agencies) require for mission critical apps.

So now that we have established that, let’s talk conference specifics and what some attendees learned about MarkLogic. Our Director of Product Management, Justin Makeig, presented on “Building a data-centered data center for agile development.” First off, the session had a great turn out. Turns out people want to know how to improve their business! Love seeing people snap photos of Justin’s slides as he’s presenting them.

Of course he covered the basics, like MarkLogic’s history and ability to solve those “hairy data problems” that don’t quite fit into today’s infrastructure, and how special Enterprise NoSQL is (after all, MarkLogic is the only Enterprise NoSQL database). And since he’s also been managing our Hadoop strategy, Justin included how Hadoop fits in to this data-centered data center.

Why is it hard to take an application-centric approach? Here is all the up-front planning required:

1. Design the app 2. Determine needed data 3. Determine the queries 4. Then finally you can design the schema and indexing strategy 5. Now you can set up a database! 6. Then figure out how to map the data to that schema (designing ETL strategy) 7. THEN you load the data 8. THEN you code the application

And if the requirements of the application change, well then you go back to step one to make any changes.

You can’t know in advance what data you’re going to need (or get in the future), and a data-centered approach makes it easy for anyone to pull the data. That way you can spend your time (and money!) actually building the applications organizations want and need to build rather than trying to organize data to fit each and every app.

Hadoop is almost synonymous with Big Data since HDFS offers a great amount of file storage, is durable, reliable, and cheap. Final piece? Analytics. Hadoop isn’t the final answer though. You will need granular updates, real-time queries, and secure access to precise data. MarkLogic helps you find the needle in the haystack. Stack MarkLogic on top as the Enterprise NoSQL database to combine the best of both worlds and deliver data services to power your applications.

More perks of a data-centered data center powered by MarkLogic: Index once, single security model, transactions (when you need them), flexible data model, elastic operations, simplified governance.

This is just a tidbit of the enlightening session and I don’t do it justice. If you’re yearning for more, please poke around on our website or try to track Justin down for more information.

By the way, Happy Valentine’s Day! If you don’t have anyone to go to an over-crowded restaurant with tonight, try playing around with MarkLogic with our free developer license… You might find out even more about this veteran NoSQL database.