MarkLogic 7 is the technology leader in the NoSQL field, writes Wikibon and Robert Frances Group  Analyst Gary MacFadden in his latest Wikibon Professional Alert. Gartner agrees, positioning MarkLogic as the leading niche player in its just released Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems. The latest announcements, made at its Summit in New York City, have added to that lead with significant updates to its Connector for Hadoop that allows Hadoop applications to access data indexed and managed in the MarkLogic Enterprise NoSQL database platform directly, along with capabilities allowing customers to leverage cloud infrastructures and tiered storage, a new semantics option that stores “RFD triples, documents and data … maintaining context and making facts available for decision -making,” additional search and query options and government-grade security. “Twelve months from now, semantics is all that the NoSQL community will be talking about,” said CEO Gary Bloom.

Founded more than a decade ago, “before Big Data was called Big Data”, by Chris Lindblad to address “the ‘publishing problem’ that plagues every large enterprise: Digitize content or die,” it was the first NoSQL database. It was specifically designed, Lindblad says, to fix what he saw as a major gap in how structured databases handled unstructured data such as documents and other text formats.

Today it has expanded to do several things. It can run natively on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System, allowing its customers, which include the BBC and major publishing houses as well as U.S. federal government departments, to do more with Hadoop environments. It can support a variety of private, public and hybrid cloud implementations and was the database behind the BBC Olympics database that at one point was receiving a quarter of all Internet traffic in Britain. It never faltered in analyzing and serving query responses to the large numbers of fans checking on their favorite events, teams and individual stars.

It has announced a new flagship product, the MarkLogic Global Enterprise, which decreases the price and incorporates former add-on features in the standard list, and has announced a new edition, MarkLogic Essential Enterprise, that is offered with perpetual, term and cloud licensing, MacFadden writes. The new versions also include a triple store capability, the basis for analysis of relationships among people or things. (A “triple” is a subject (Harry), predicate (lives in) and an object (New York), MacFadden explains). This is a hot new area for companies leveraging social data from sites like Facebook and Twitter.

He quotes MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom as saying that MarkLogic is five years ahead of the rest of the field in technology development. MacFadden says it also has a strong lead in market share over its NoSQL competition. The big challenge ahead of it is competing with the big SQL vendors such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft for their $25 billion market.

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