Last week we put out a press release announcing the availability of MarkLogic 8 Early Access Edition, which coincided with our Partner Summit in New York. I had the opportunity to talk to some of our partners and CTOs, and it was a great opportunity to capture some initial reactions about MarkLogic 8—both from those who are very familiar with MarkLogic already and some potential partners that were just hearing about the new features for the first time.

MarkLogic 8 is arguably one of the biggest releases in company history. For a company that has had XML at its core for over a decade, this is a big move to now natively store JSON as a data type right alongside XML.

I wouldn’t say this is like Vatican II or anything, but it’s a transition to seriously expand the flexibility and power of MarkLogic to a much broader audience. I think it’s a tipping point for MarkLogic and there’s a palpable excitement about how the database landscape is going to be impacted.

Talking to our partners at the summit, I found their response to MarkLogic 8 overwhelmingly positive. They are excited to show it to their clients because they are showing them things that never existed before. And, in fact, some of our partners are already building new applications on MarkLogic 8 that will go live into production soon after the general announcement in early 2015. With MarkLogic 7, a customer went into production within two weeks after it became available. I’m looking forward to seeing whether anyone can beat that record.

MarkLogic’s CTOs were also very excited to talk about some of their favorite features in MarkLogic. When asked in a panel discussion what their favorite MarkLogic 8 feature was, this is what they said:

• Matt “Metadata-guy” Turner, CTO for Media and Publishing at MarkLogic:
  “Semantics is my favorite new feature. What was previously mostly academic, with a few rough edges, is now an enterprise capability that has been even further expanded with Marklogic 8. Semantics was behind the scenes until a few years ago, but it’s now a board level, strategic conversation about how to make content and data smarter. I like to refer to it as the ‘revenge of the librarians’ as its bringing context and library science techniques to the forefront, solving real business problems with a really powerful technology.”
• Rupert Brown, CTO for Financial Services at MarkLogic:
  “Bitemporality is my favorite. In a previous role, I had a boss who was big DB2 fan but the team kept tripping up with the challenging schema problems. Bitemporal in MarkLogic isn’t a problem though because it has a flexible data model. And, it’s even better when combined with semantics. We can now ask, ‘When did the semantic relationship exist?’”
• Ken Krupa, Enterprise CTO at MarkLogic:
  “I’m not going to pick just one favorite new feature. Semantics and Bitemporal are both great. I see a lot of opportunity to use semantics to support better data integration, as a relational database can look like a SPARQL interface. Also, Bitemporal allows you to look at data in new ways—and it’s something that all data can have. But, it’s also really exciting that these innovative features are wrapped up with an improved developer experience. We’ve already had great tech and those who knew us knew that. But now we’re giving as many ways as possible to speak to MarkLogic, and I think we’re going to see rapid growth in the developer community.”

I agree with Ken—it’s not just one new feature. It’s the sum of features in MarkLogic 8 that make is incredibly powerful. The pillars of MarkLogic—power, agility, trust—are all being strengthened in MarkLogic 8.

I look forward to the upcoming launch, because I know that MarkLogic 8 is truly one of the biggest launches in MarkLogic’s history, and there’s something in it for everyone—whether you’re a developer, DBA, architect, or CIO.

If you’re interested in getting started today, then give MarkLogic 8 Early Access a try.

Responses to MarkLogic 8 at the Partner Summit in NYC from MarkLogic.