MarkLogic released a new version of its database Oct. 19 with a host of new features aimed at helping organizations deal with unstructured data.
In MarkLogic Server 4.2, the company has added a new ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) tool for managing the data. According to Ken Chestnut, vice president of product marketing at MarkLogic, the tool, Information Studio, is meant to simplify the loading and processing of information by allowing users to “drag and drop files and load them as [is] without normalizing or preprocessing them first.”
Chestnut said, “Information Studio allows organizations to build sophisticated loading processes without having to write any code. This means less code to write and manage and fewer opportunities to introduce errors or performance problems. As your application and information processing requirements evolve, Information Studio provides a way extend the built-in functionality without having to reinvent all of the plumbing to do things like progress reporting and error handling.”
In addition to Information Studio, the company added a number of other features, including replication, database rollback and failover. The company also added support for XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) to allow organizations to “more quickly support new devices/channels or update existing ones all while leveraging their investment in existing XSLT style sheets and skills,” Chestnut said.
MarkLogic’s target market is industries dealing with volumes of unstructured information such as images, tweets, blogs and research data. “The information explosion makes MarkLogic 4.2 increasingly applicable to companies outside of MarkLogic’s traditional key verticals of media, government and financial services,” Matt Aslett, an analyst with 451 Group, said in a statement.
“As the increased amount of unstructured information makes the need for a specialized database more necessary than ever, we expect increased adoption of MarkLogic,” Aslett said.
“Existing relational databases (RDBMS) are suited to manage data that is predefined and in standardized format such as payroll, accounts payable [and] contacts,” Chestnut explained. “It is data that is highly structured and fits into rows and columns. With the explosion in … volume as well as different forms of information such as contracts, Web content, e-mails, documents, e-books, videos, images, etc. (we call this unstructured), organizations are struggling with both managing and exploiting this information using existing technologies.”