From the start, the NoSQL movement within the developer community has been grounded in the idea that there needed to be a different way of building applications that wasn’t boxed-in by the constraints of relational databases. Unfortunately, in their exuberance of being liberated from the chains of Oracle and Microsoft, DBA’s and purchasing departments, developers also started thinking that they also didn’t have to worry about the enterprise-readiness of the systems they were building out. They were willing to give up some of the sacred cows of the enterprise (ACID transactions and security come to mind first) in exchange for the speed and agility of building out systems based on NoSQL.
It is hard to find a developer these days that hasn’t played around with one (or a variety) of the free, open source NoSQL databases: Cassandra, MongoDB®, Riak, HBase to name a few. At small scale and without the need to have the application pass the scrutiny of the IT department, these projects have been thrilling joy rides enjoyed beyond the supervision of the CIO. Besides, developers figured that those enterprise capabilities could always be built-in and bolted-on later.
So, here we are three or four years into the NoSQL movement, and it is now time to get serious. The bottom line is this: systems built for the enterprise require hardened, enterprise features that can’t be compromised and can’t be an afterthought.
CIOs, heads of development and the developers themselves are waking up to the realization that when it is time to put these NoSQL applications into the production, there is a tremendous amount of work still needed to get them ready. If they go into production without security, ACID transactions, high availability, backup and recovery—it would be the equivalent of heading down a long and winding road in a toy car. Eventually, the brakes stop working and the wheels fall off.
But while the open-source enthusiasts have been enjoying their pizza and beer and playing with flavor-of-the-month technology, a new class of Enterprise NoSQL developer has emerged. They recognized the need for integrated search, certified security, clustering, replication, failover, alerting, full-text and geospatial indexing, and a suite of application development tools. And, they turned to the only Enterprise NoSQL database that provided those features: MarkLogic.
This new class of Enterprise NoSQL developer starts building out applications confident that they have all of the capabilities they will need in order to deploy their applications into production as soon as they’re done. They don’t have the drudgery of creating workarounds to ensure ACID transactions, building in security, integrating and maintaining 3rd party search engines, or building out frameworks or administration tools. All that work was already done by MarkLogic: who is trusted by enterprises like Citibank, Dow Jones, BBC and every three letter US agency.
When playtime is over and it is time to seriously support the needs of your enterprise, the clear choice is to upgrade to MarkLogic Enterprise NoSQL. (We even have a MarkLogic converter for MongoDB® that speeds the import of data from MongoDB® into MarkLogic so you can start using MarkLogic’s integrated search and enterprise features faster.)
MarkLogic Enterprise Edition is powerful, accessible and trusted — and is also free for developers. Get your free developer license for MarkLogic Enterprise Edition today.