Search workflows have become faster for complex data while cloud-native flexibility still needs work
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for MarkLogic is primarily for health and insurance companies, and secondarily for publishers who maintain a large set of books online and any company that deals with big data. We keep high volume of data in MarkLogic because it provides a good search engine to query data in large datasets.
A specific example of how a publisher company would use MarkLogic in their workflow is maintaining data of a book, including who published that book, what the author name is, and how many editions exist. You can imagine that there are billions of books across the world, and we want to keep that digitized information in MarkLogic. If you want to search for a particular author, find how many books are published by a particular publisher, or discover editions of a particular book, you can get that information very quickly.
What is most valuable?
The best features MarkLogic offers include the ability to store unstructured data. You really don't need any particular schema, although it does support storing documents according to a particular schema, but that is not mandatory. You can store your data in XML and JSON format and you can store even binaries, JPEGs, PDFs and that kind of content in MarkLogic. The second feature is that it has a very rich search and cts APIs to build search engines on large datasets. The third is the spell suggestion APIs where, as you type, you will get suggestions of what you are searching for, which helps users understand what they are really searching for. Fourth is the redaction APIs. If you have a large set of data in a live environment and want redacted data in lower environments, the redaction APIs are very effective. From a user perspective, you can keep your data in redacted format in any environment, even on production.
The other valuable feature is the CPF, which is the Content Processing Framework. That is a very powerful tool. You can orchestrate how your document is processed before insertion or after insertion. A big example is that as soon as you have loaded a PDF into MarkLogic and want to extract the data from that PDF and store it as XML in MarkLogic for searching, that is where CPF is very useful.
MarkLogic has impacted my organization positively. We used to have one fetch API which was built using .NET API and the backend was SQL. We got to know from customers that the API was very slow and they were getting impacted. We moved to MarkLogic and created the API using JavaScript server-side language, and we saw almost 60% improvement in the speed of the search. The fetch results were 60% faster after that.
What needs improvement?
I think MarkLogic can be improved by providing good cloud infrastructure. Since we are in a very tech era, MarkLogic should provide good cloud infrastructure. If you look at other databases or systems like Kafka and MongoDB, they have cloud infrastructure. You do not need to worry about maintaining your own servers or provisioning your own servers. You simply log in and tell MarkLogic you want a certain number of clusters or nodes in a cluster and what cloud provider you want to use, then click okay, and they will build it for you. That is a headache with MarkLogic.
Apart from that, I don't see any issues. It is a really great product.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using MarkLogic for 11 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
MarkLogic is not entirely stable. We used to have production issues, mainly due to MarkLogic failures. The node goes down sometimes or some memory errors occur. It is stable, but if I rate it out of 100%, it is 80-85% stable. Every year we used to have four to five issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
MarkLogic's scalability is very bad. In production, when you get to know that your data is increasing and you need to add one more node, that is not easy and not straightforward. You really need to do a lot of work and a lot of planning before you will be able to scale. But in today's world, if I talk about other systems like MarkLogic, if you have to scale, it is just a five-minute job. With MarkLogic, that is not the case.
How are customer service and support?
I find customer support to be good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
MarkLogic has really good deployment processes. If you have a big MarkLogic architecture with hundreds of nodes in the cluster, many databases, forests, and many app servers, their deployment features like ML-Gradle can automate everything. You can create a new cluster within minutes through that Gradle. That is a very good feature they have provided.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm not much aware of pricing, setup costs, and licensing because that is another team that deals with it. But if I am correct, a few times I heard them saying that MarkLogic is quite costly, and they are looking to move away in the longer run for that reason.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing MarkLogic, we analyzed SQL and other solutions, but after analyzing and doing some POCs, we found that in our case, we had to store a large amount of binary data and SQL was not that good at storing binary data, especially when your need is to perform searches inside the binaries. That was something we did not find in SQL, and we did not prefer SQL for that reason.
What other advice do I have?
My advice to others looking into using MarkLogic is that they really need to evaluate their use case. First, they need to evaluate what MarkLogic provides and what the features of MarkLogic are. Then they need to evaluate their use cases and check whether they are able to use the core features of MarkLogic. If not, then there is no point in moving to MarkLogic. Since it has a costly license, they really need to evaluate whether the features MarkLogic is providing would allow them to utilize most of them or not. I would love to see MarkLogic in more cloud-native architecture. I am giving this review a rating of 7.
Banking data workflows have become faster and now support rich PDF and media management
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for MarkLogic is data development. We have a banking type of data, so we used to convert it to PDF or use some for applications we were running.
A quick, specific example of how I use MarkLogic with my banking data involves creating PDFs based on XML files and developing subscription kind of applications. In that, we used to send scheduled PDFs and some scheduled emails generated from that application using MarkLogic.
In addition to my main use case, I also perform development and some MarkLogic admin work as well.
What is most valuable?
In my experience, the best features MarkLogic offers include indexing, which is a quick and efficient way to get the files and I really appreciate that.
The indexing feature of MarkLogic has helped my work by being quick, faster, and very helpful for the team to get the code quicker and to ensure everything is fast.
MarkLogic has positively impacted my organization by making everything quick and fast, and I believe that is a major change we have seen here. In fact, the development process is much quicker than other applications we were using previously.
What needs improvement?
As for areas where MarkLogic can be improved, nothing else comes to mind. I have been using MarkLogic for seven years, and many improvements have already been addressed. I do not recall any additional needed improvements.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using MarkLogic for around seven years.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, we were using SQL, but to save the PDFs and everything was not possible in SQL. Right now, it is possible in MarkLogic to save all the images, videos, and everything, which is very useful, and that is why we switched from SQL to MarkLogic.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment as time is really being saved using MarkLogic.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing, I find it quite high compared to other things, but I believe it is justified.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
My advice for others looking into using MarkLogic is that it is a better way than SQL and while some main things can be improved, it is the best way right now in the market.
What other advice do I have?
I chose a nine for my rating because it is faster, and I deducted one point because of the price of MarkLogic. My overall review rating is 9.
Marklogic review by a Senior Consultant
What do you like best about the product?
Below are some of the features that I like about Marklogic
1. Multi media database capabilities- The storage and ability to manage different types of data models in single platform has helped me to run my projects simultaneously handling data types such as JSON, XML
2. Enterprise Search Functionality- The in built search options had helped me in searching across all data types. The feature also helped me to search using full text, range queries etc.
3. Storage and Query capability- This feautre helped me in optimizing the storage infrastructure by placing data in different storage tiers. It helped me to reduce the cost incurred and the data can be accessed frequently .
What do you dislike about the product?
Below are some of the dislikes of Marklogic
1. Learning curve- despite the features , marklogic proven to be having a deep learning curve.
2. Cost and Licensing - The total ownership model is having a greated inmpact in taking this software as a package for any development. The cost will be a barrier to any small and medium sized projects. Even though my org has provided access to this platform by to get to that stage we had to go through a lot of to and fro
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The software helped me in storing and managing documents which is in xml format. The software helped us in preventing the doc structure which was crucial for my project.
The project also helped me explore the advanced search capabilities by frequently using this for searching content within XML.
Database, search engine and integration tool rolled into one
What do you like best about the product?
It's multimodel structure of combining different files is really helpful. It has capability to handle both structured and unstructured data is great and its build in AI capability is greats.
What do you dislike about the product?
Building predefined models on large datasets takes a lot of time. Documentation could have been better.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use it as a database and ETL tool capable of building models quickly.
MarkLogic- A powerful tool/database for all your NoSQL transactions.
What do you like best about the product?
The best thing about the Mark Logic is that it is a single platform that combines the capability of being a database,a search engine.
It also provides the tools for data integrations.
It is comparatively fast,economical and easier to manage.
It is very easy to use and the customer support is also very prompt to response.
The features are easy to implement and can be integrfated with other tools as well.
Even an unexperienced person can implement its features thus it is frequently use in our organization.
What do you dislike about the product?
The User interface could be improved to be more user friendly.
The spreadsheet capabilities can also be increased.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are using it to cater the data integration capabilities for one of our client working in the pharma sector.
The amount of data that is being processed is very large and it requires a platform that can caters the ever growing need of the database along with the faster processing and MarkLogic proves to be a perfect tool for it.
Very efficient database platform
What do you like best about the product?
The most helpful feature in this platform is having multi level database with AI features.
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing to dislike for now, very helpful.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Marklogic can handle both structured and unstructured database, which is very helpful and effective to use.
Capable & Efficient Product
What do you like best about the product?
Listed are the things which I liked most about Marklogic -
a. The flexibilty it provides to handle various type of data
b. Its in-build capability to support CICD.
c. Its capability to integrate with Pega
What do you dislike about the product?
Couple of things, I think Marklogic can improve -
a. Increase its community base as sometimes it becomes tad difficult to find support.
b. Sometimes it crashes so there is a need to improve on the stability/relaibity of the product.I am sure it will be worked upon in future releases
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We have integrated Marklogic with our Pega system for case management and its perfomance has been above expectation.
A No SQL Database platform with great query capability and amazing user Interface
What do you like best about the product?
Most usefull thig in marklogic is the multi format data ingetion(XML,JSOn etc), it is having a query runner which supports multiple query language which was very usefull, also unlike other nosql provider it suuports ACID property which can be a USP in this segment,
I personaly find setting up security parameters were very user friendly , as We were working with data form different type of customer.
What do you dislike about the product?
One problem i personaly feel, even though the user interface is amazing still sometime it confuses me as it is having a huge feature,
Also as the company offers robust solution so they definetly need to increase their community,
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
As we were getting raw data form different sources so our data was coming in various format, sometime XML sometime JSON , we need a solution where we dont need to worry about data imports, supporting multiple data ingetion format marklogic solves this issue,
Also we maintain transaction in some cases so we needed the ACID property which is very uncommon in other document databases, Marklogic solves this issue very effciently by supporting ACID property
A good alternative for a holistic NOSQL database
What do you like best about the product?
simple, great api integrations, provides different language support for querying, more features other than just database.
What do you dislike about the product?
available forums/documentation, pricing, learning curve
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
solves unstructured data storage problems with features required from RDBMS. It helps in scaling applications since it provides API hooks and integration.
MarkLogic is a versatile database that can be easy to search, manage and house data.
What do you like best about the product?
MarkLogic can be a powerful search tool for finding specific information. It can handle and integrate many different types of data, making compiling easy.
It has through security protocols and robust notifications.
What do you dislike about the product?
MarkLogic can be overwhelminig to even experinced users, UI is built for professionals not layperson. It can be very expensive, so scale is important.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
MarkLogic managies diverse data sets, with quick and informative search capabilities. These can make information protection and effiencey much easier to manage and creates opportunities for further development. It intergrates with a variety of third-party software and is great for changing ideas/solutions.
