MarkLogic Corporation has announced a major new version of its flagship product, MarkLogic Server, a purpose-built database for unstructured information targeted at customers in three verticals: media/publishing, government, and financial services segments.
"The key differentiator for us as opposed to other databases is our ability to load information as-is, without normalizing the data or predefining the data model," explains Ken Chestnut, vice president of product marketing, MarkLogic. The new 4.2 release has three major themes - agility and ease of use, enterprise grade robustness, and industry-leading search and discovery, according to Chestnut.
MarkLogic Server 4.2 includes MarkLogic Information Studio, an ETL (extract, transformation, and loading) tool for that makes loading information within MarkLogic easier. Using Information Studio, customers can simply drag and drop files or point to a file directory to load into MarkLogic. When combined with other application services including Application Builder, the company says Information Studio provides benefits in terms of accelerating development of new information applications while reducing the cost of operations of MarkLogic. "With typical ETL tools, to load data into a database or data warehouse, you have to go through some level of transformation and normalization of the data to fit it into an existing data model. With Information Studio, while you have the option to do that, it is not required," Chestnut notes.
New XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) support expands options that customers can employ to access and transform information in MarkLogic 4.2. XSLT is the standard around doing transformations of information. "This is very key to our media customers, to be able to support new devices and new channels that may not yet be known, and being able to transform the information and make it relevant or specific or applicable to those devices," Chestnut explains.
MarkLogic Server 4.2 also enables organizations to selectively replicate documents or parts of documents across databases. In addition to enabling disaster recovery solutions, replication can be used to transform information as it is distributed to facilitate information sharing in secure or regulated environments.
A new feature, database rollback, enables instantaneous point-in-time rollback. This feature reduces operational costs and downtime when recovering from data corruption caused by a user or an application. "This is extremely important and valuable for customers both within the government as well as financial services," Chestnut observes.
In addition, the new release allows servers to automatically take over for a failed hardware server within a cluster, ensuring high availability of your information even when a server fails.
For more information about the new release, go here.