When comparing SQLite vs MarkLogic, the Slant community recommends SQLite for most people. In the question“What are the best ACID-compliant scalable databases?” SQLite is ranked 2nd while MarkLogic is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose SQLite is:
SQLite is also only 350KiB in size.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Small
SQLite is also only 350KiB in size.
Pro Great language support
SQLite has bindings for a large number of programming languages, including BASIC, Delphi, C, C#, C++, Clipper//Harbour, Common Lisp, Curl, D, Free Pascal, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Livecode, Lua, newLisp, Objective-C (on OS X and iOS), OCaml, Perl, PHP, Pike, PureBasic, Python, R, REALbasic, REBOL, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk, Tcl, Visual Basic.
Pro Self-contained
SQLite is largely self-contained. It requires very minimal support from external libraries or from the operating system.
Pro Portable
An SQLite database is a single ordinary disk file that can be located anywhere in the directory hierarchy. It works by sending requests to a single file where all the data is kept instead of communicating with a hosted database which gives access to an interface by making use of sockets and ports. The file format used is also cross-platform, so can easily be migrated to various machines.
This makes SQLite extremely portable throughout different applications, all that's needed to transfer the whole database is to make a copy of the file.
Pro Great for testing and first stages of development
Because of it's ability to scale and with the portability that a single-file database gives you without losing much of the power and features that SQL gives developers, it's a great choice for testing applications and for the early stages of development when the workload and the data that needs to be stored is not that large.
Pro Not unnecessarily fiddly
Pro Reliable
With less complication, there is less to go wrong.
Pro Zero configuration
There is literally no configuration required to get SQL lite up and running. This is mainly due to SQLite being serverless, there is no separate server process to install, setup, configure, initialize, manage, and troubleshoot.
Pro Search engine native
No other ACID database has even close to the text handling capabilities that are built-in to MarkLogic. Many multi-model databases rely on Lucene to provide text indexing, which leads to unnecessary latency and complexity.
Pro Massively scalable
Configuring MarkLogic for scale out is simple with both APIs and UI based mechanisms to add and manage cluster nodes that auto-shard and redistribute themselves for maximum efficiency.
Pro XML powerhouse
MarkLogic supports XML natively and adheres to all W3C standards surrounding XML. It even uses XQuery as a powerful application engine. Recent editions are also JSON native, which makes it fit in with modern JavaScript and web-centric applications.
Pro Uniquely offers full ACID transactions in a multi-model database
MarkLogic is the only Multi-model database in the world that is fully ACID and treats unstructured content as a first class citizen.
Cons
Con No multi user
Lacks multi-user capabilities, see SQLite vs. MySQL vs. PostgreSQL: A Comparison of Relational Databases.
Also see: Appropriate Uses For SQLite.
Con Some SQL features are missing
SQLite is made to be extremely lightweight and portable, but it still uses SQL. However, some SQL features such as RIGHT OUTER JOIN
and FOR EACH STATEMENT
are missing.
Con Enterprise focused
MarkLogic is more focused on the specific needs of enterprise customers who need ACID rigor and element level security. There are less costly options if eventual consistency and application-level security are good enough for you.
Con Proprietary
License is $18k/year
Con Too good to be true
If you are skeptical about product claims, MarkLogic may seem a bit too good to be true. MANY applications could benefit from implementing MarkLogic instead of creaky old RDBMS or immature NoSQL databases or even search engines like Lucene/Solr/Elastic.
