A little-known fact about the New York Summit last month: The keynote was actually given by a would-be assassin of MarkLogic.
Mike Bowers, lead engineer at The Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints (LDS), had been tasked with an initiative that would “kill” MarkLogic. With precise methodology, he installed MarkLogic’s enterprise NoSQL server in the lab and began putting it through rigorous tests. Instead of failing, however, MarkLogic blew the doors off LDS’ incumbent: Oracle’s XML database. And instead of hating MarkLogic, Bowers was smitten.
It might seem a bit far-fetched for a church to be so zealous in benchmarking performance, but LDS is no ordinary church. With sermons, hymnals, and video broadcasts –in over 175 languages– going out to millions of people worldwide, LDS may be the largest publisher of content on the planet.
Here is what Bowers found 5 years ago.
| What | MarkLogic | Oracle 11g |
| Load and Index 41 GB of XML | 8 hours | +60 hours |
| Load and index XML transactionally | 10x faster | Index corrupted |
| Return relevance-ranked search results | 10x faster | |
| Use collations in XQuery (phonebook sort, language-specific sort, etc) | Yes | No |
| Write performant, scalable queries to construct search-facet frequencies | Yes | No |
Today, Bowers has turned his sights on the NoSQL movement in general, and without any prompting from MarkLogic (though we thank him handsomely) he has ranked the most popular databases accordingly:
| MarkLogic | MongoDB | Riak | Cloudant CouchDB |
Cassandra | |
| Overall Developer Productivity | Great | Good | Poor | Good | Poor |
| Overall Application Performance | Great | Good | Good | Good | Good |
| Overall Enterprise Readiness | Great | Poor | Poor | Poor | Poor |
To see the full justification of his ranking, listen to his keynote on-demand. You won’t want to miss it.