News
From Assassin to Ambassador
Posted by Diane Burley on 04 January 2013 08:48 PM

A little-known fact about the New York Summit last month: The keynote was actually given by a would-be assassin of MarkLogic.

Mike Bowers, lead engineer at The Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints (LDS), had been tasked with an initiative that would “kill” MarkLogic. With precise methodology, he installed MarkLogic’s enterprise NoSQL server in the lab and began putting it through rigorous tests. Instead of failing, however, MarkLogic blew the doors off LDS’ incumbent: Oracle’s XML database. And instead of hating MarkLogic, Bowers was smitten.

It might seem a bit far-fetched for a church to be so zealous in benchmarking performance, but LDS is no ordinary church. With sermons, hymnals, and video broadcasts –in over 175 languages– going out to millions of people worldwide, LDS may be the largest publisher of content on the planet.

Here is what Bowers found 5 years ago.

What MarkLogic Oracle 11g
Load and Index 41 GB of XML 8 hours +60 hours
Load and index XML transactionally 10x faster Index corrupted
Return relevance-ranked search results 10x faster
Use collations in XQuery (phonebook sort, language-specific sort, etc) Yes No
Write performant, scalable queries to construct search-facet frequencies Yes No

Today, Bowers has turned his sights on the NoSQL movement in general, and without any prompting from MarkLogic (though we thank him handsomely) he has ranked the most popular databases accordingly:

MarkLogic MongoDB Riak Cloudant
CouchDB 		Cassandra
Overall Developer Productivity Great Good Poor Good Poor
Overall Application Performance Great Good Good Good Good
Overall Enterprise Readiness Great Poor Poor Poor Poor

To see the full justification of his ranking, listen to his keynote on-demand. You won’t want to miss it.

From Assassin to Ambassador from MarkLogic.
Comments (0)