MarkLogic comes to developers
September 20, 2012 —
(Page 1 of 3)
MarkLogic on Monday announced the availability of version 6 of its eponymous database. This previously XQuery-based scalable NoSQL database now includes support for Java, JSON and REST. MarkLogic 6 also adds new analytics capabilities, business intelligence integrations and in-database MapReduce.
Gary Lang, executive vice president of products at MarkLogic, said that the decision to add these new APIs was made due to the difficulty of finding developers proficient with XQuery. “If the key to really using MarkLogic is that you have to find an XQuery programmer, that's a very high bar to reach. You go down the list of popular languages, and XQuery isn't on any of them,” he said.
Indeed, in the Tiobe Software index of language popularity, XQuery does not appear at all, while other database-specific languages like PL/SQL and Transact-SQL are in the Top 20.
But that doesn't mean MarkLogic is giving up on XQuery. Said Lang, “We don’t want to ask customers to learn something idiosyncratic like that. It'll always be there because that's what we're built on, but what we're able to expose with the REST APIs has access to most of the capabilities. Like Oracle, you have access to most capabilities through JDBC [and other connectors], but when you want to do something powerful, you write PL/SQL.”
Market heating up
MarkLogic's introduction of new capabilities comes at a time when the business of NoSQL is finally becoming just that: a business. The top four NoSQL firms have each raised well over $10 million in funding, with 10gen raising over seven times that amount. It all adds up to a market where the hot new companies are all hoping to follow in Oracle's footsteps, if not be acquired by it outright.
Bob Wiederhold, president of Couchbase, said, “I think you're going to see increased competition among the players because as each of us are continuing to fill out the feature sets of our products, they are naturally going to overlap more and more with one another. With us moving into the document database market, we will compete more with MongoDB. Cassandra has had a good cross-data center replication ability, and we're competing with them there now.”
Related Search Term(s): MarkLogic, NoSQL
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/36968