Faster, more efficient application development

Whether you are looking to build new applications for your organization or embed XML content capabilities into your existing products, MarkLogic Server provides the single infrastructure necessary to build and deploy applications. It includes an XML repository , full-text and XML search capabilities , XQuery engine and a web server, giving you everything you need to meet your XML content delivery needs. This means that you can more quickly develop applications, and those applications run more efficiently and effectively because they are on a single platform, saving you time and money.

Ease of integration

MarkLogic Server supports loading content “as-is”, which means you can avoid making costly, time consuming and sometimes impossible transformations with your content. Instead, you can easily combine XML content, documents, books, messages, user generated content and more into a single centralized repository . You can also get started more quickly when creating applications, because you don’t need to try to convert your content to its final form before you start experimenting with new applications and new business models.

Increased agility

Add the agility your organization needs to respond to changing demands and market conditions. With MarkLogic Server you can experiment with your content and rapidly develop and deploy new content applications that solve a wide array of needs. This will help you find new opportunities to exploit your existing content to increase revenue and operational efficiency.

Improved reuse of your XML content

MarkLogic Server gives you the flexibility to experiment with new business models, create prototypes of applications and repurpose your content for new and possibly unforeseen uses. Make your existing content go further by using it for multiple purposes —print, online delivery, syndication, and more. This agility means that you have the freedom to repackage existing content into new information products that drive new revenue streams and reach new users.

Greater understanding of content / use patterns

Gain a better understanding of your content – and how users are working with it through content analytics . MarkLogic Server lets you understand and find new patterns, relationships and other details within your content. This knowledge of how your content is related and how users interact with it enables you to evolve and refine your products to better meet user needs.

Flexible, dynamic delivery

Dynamically deliver content in any format or to any device, and improve the accessibility of your information. MarkLogic Server allows you to query content, combine it on the fly, and perform any transformations and deliver to the user dynamically. This means you can more easily satisfy a larger set of users by delivering just the content they want in context.

Making content findable

With MarkLogic Server you can provide users with a rich navigation experience by enabling them to easily browse through their content or refine their search results using facets based on categories or tags to find the information they are looking for. This means that your users more quickly find what they need and are more satisfied with their search experience, which increases repeat visits and re-use.

Simple, cost-effective growth

MarkLogic Server is designed to efficiently scale up and out on today’s commodity hardware. It has an advanced architecture that was designed to scale to internet-size problems while delivering sub-second response times to user queries. This means that as your deployment grows you can support more users and more content on fewer servers, resulting in reduced hardware and maintenance costs. Additionally, data center costs can be lower due to the fact that there are fewer servers required to meet your content needs.

MarkLogic Server differs from traditional technologies such as hybrid-relational databases and enterprise search engines in that it was designed and optimized for handling XML content. This fundamental architectural difference provides you with a sustainable long-term advantage that cannot be achieved by traditional technologies.

In comparison with using hybrid-relational databases and search engines for your application, MarkLogic Server has a number of advantages:

Built for content

MarkLogic Server is designed from the ground up to handle XML content. This means that it allows you to more quickly load content regardless of schema , and yet still leverage the inherent structure of your content for processing. With the power of XML as its native storage format, MarkLogic provides the most flexible search and delivery options.

Superior scalability

MarkLogic Server is designed to efficiently manage repositories from 10’s of gigabytes up to 100’s of terabytes of content, while providing sub-second response times at the most demanding user loads. Based on a distributed architecture of commodity hardware servers, configurations are easily expanded as needs grow. Performance optimization for content loading and query evaluation lowers hardware costs by requiring fewer servers.

Universal indexing

The universal index within MarkLogic Server is automatically populated with both the full-text and XML structure within XML content. This single view of information assets leads to faster configuration, lower maintenance costs and increased agility.

Instant content availability

Search engines have a built-in lag between when content is available and when it’s indexed (and therefore returned by searches). With MarkLogic Server, as soon as content is added to the contentbase or changed, it is immediately available and returned in all appropriate searches. This means that you do not have to worry about users getting wrong results due to stale content in the index.

Combined XML and text search

MarkLogic Server allows you to write powerful queries that combine XML and text constraints (e.g., find contracts with a “governing law” section and a paragraph in the section containing “California”). The combined search provides for more powerful search capabilities that can be exposed to the users as needed. This unique blend of relevance-based models with database-style functionality provides multiple ways to access your content.

One-step answers

MarkLogic Server provides one-step answers to queries by returning specified content elements directly, instead of links to entire documents. Users no longer need to click through to each link in a list of results individually, repeating the process until they find the answer—improving their satisfaction with your application’s search.

Structure-aware XML search

MarkLogic Server can search XML elements, attributes, values, and combinations, with a full understanding of the hierarchy. This means your search will examine document structure and metadata, as well as words, giving you more flexibility when designing your search strategy. This enables you to build next-generation applications that better leverage your content.

Powerful XQuery implementation

MarkLogic Server provides the industry’s most extensive implementation of the W3C-standard XML Query (XQuery) language. This means you can write applications in a high-level, declarative language and take advantage of training courses and other open access resources when developing and maintaining your applications, reducing your overall costs.

XML repository with transactional storage

MarkLogic Server can be the system of record for your content, providing you with a single integrated and centralized version of your content, reducing the storage costs that result from duplication of an entire cache as is done with search engines. It implements a transactional system that is designed for consistent information access even when content is actively being updated or modified. Furthermore, transactions are handled in a fully non-blocking manner, ensuring that users will never have to wait for results. This real time view of your information also means that results will always reflect the latest changes.

MarkLogic Server was architected for XML with the goal of handling extremely large amounts of content and providing exceptionally fast access to that content using XQuery. These architectural principals have resulted in a platform that provides you with a sustainable long-term advantage when dealing with your content. As your content grows, becomes more complex or needs to be delivered in new ways, MarkLogic Server is already in position to help you with those needs, no matter what they are.

The key areas in which MarkLogic Server delivers the functionality you need to develop content applications include:

XML content store

MarkLogic Server stores and processes content as XML. This means that, unlike search engines, Mark Logic can serve as the system of record for your content by providing persistent storage of content. It also means that content processing is performed in an extremely efficient manner, providing significant performance advantages over technologies that must convert to some other representation before processing.

Load content “as-is”

MarkLogic Server loads XML documents without requiring adherence to any predefined DTD or XML schema. This gives you the agility to develop content applications much quicker than approaches that require content to be standardized on a single schema.

In-line content enrichment

MarkLogic Server enables you to enrich documents without reloading your content. For example, editors can update documents with annotations and metadata, users can add comments or ratings, and automated tools can identify entities or add location information all without reloading. With MarkLogic Server you can leverage this meta-information regardless of the structure to build new applications or features, without having to convert all of your content to a standard schema.

Full-text search

MarkLogic Server provides the standard capabilities you’d find in a search engine , such as phrase, Boolean, proximity, wildcard, parametric, and range search capabilities. We also support language processing, such as stemming, thesauri, and spell-checking. You can expose simple “single box” query interfaces or more complex advanced query capabilities for users who want or need to perform research in your content.

Search and query

MarkLogic Server goes well beyond basic search by providing not only standard full-text search capabilities, but also database-style queries against content. Not only can you restrict search to any XML element or attribute (leveraging hierarchical structure), but you can also return the content of any elements as a result.

Faceted navigation

With MarkLogic Server you can provide users with a rich interface for exploring their search results through faceted navigation . This allows them to drill down based on any number of “facets” to more quickly identify the information they are looking for. For users unfamiliar with the contentbase, this directory-style browse interface allows them to discover previously unknown information.

Universal index

A query system is only as good as the indexes behind it. Like search engines, MarkLogic Server indexes the words within documents. Unlike search engines, MarkLogic Server also indexes XML elements , their structure, and the text within them. This means that MarkLogic Server can quickly evaluate text queries, structural queries, and queries that combine both text and structural constraints (e.g., find diagram captions that mention “engine” in articles whose title contains “Airbus”).

XQuery

MarkLogic Server provides the industry’s most extensive implementation of the W3C-standard XML Query (XQuery) language. By providing a query language, as opposed to a search box and simple API, MarkLogic Server allows you to write much more powerful queries than what's possible with search engines. And you can write those queries in a high-level programming language that does not bind you to a vendor’s proprietary syntax or API.

Content manipulation and transformation

MarkLogic Server is designed to process and manipulate content . The underlying capabilities include transactional updates, content processing pipelines and flow control, along with a powerful XQuery engine for querying and manipulating content.

Automatic content conversion

MarkLogic Server offers integrated, automatic conversion of documents from popular formats—such as Microsoft Office, PDF and HTML—to XML. MarkLogic Server includes a content processing framework for customizable conversion and transformation services during content ingestion.