When comparing MySQL vs MarkLogic, the Slant community recommends MySQL for most people. In the question“What are the best databases for building social network like apps?” MySQL is ranked 2nd while MarkLogic is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose MySQL is:
MySQL is made to handle a lot of data and to be used in large applications. This makes it extremely scalable and fast, even under a lot of workload.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Scalable
MySQL is made to handle a lot of data and to be used in large applications. This makes it extremely scalable and fast, even under a lot of workload.
Pro Multiple third-party tools that help working with MySQL
Since MySQL is one of the most popular relational databases, maybe the most popular, there exist many third-party tools and applications that help developers to use MySQL in their development.
Pro Easy to start working with
Because of it's popularity there are a lot of tutorials and guides out there that help developers install and work with MySQL. The installation process itself is not very hard and there are multiple powerful GUI tools that make it extremely easy to work with MySQL for a beginner.
Pro High performance graph database
While known as a document-oriented noSQL database, MarkLogic also provides a standards-compliant triple store that can be used to enrich document-shaped data with semantic links.
Pro Enterprise strength security and transactions
The two fatal flaws of many open source solutions is lack of integrated security at the element level and full ACID transaction support. MarkLogic has both and is trusted with some of the worlds most sensitive data. It is the engine that powers healthcare.gov, which despite some early problems (not caused by MarkLogic) is an amazing technological achievement.
Pro Multi-model database
MarkLogic supports text, documents, key-value/tuple, graphs, tables and object models that don't require extensive data-modeling and normalization that is part of the lifecycle process of relational database management systems. For sites similar to LinkedIn, Facebook, IMDB and even search engines, MarkLogic provides a unique set of features that are all in one box.
Pro No ETL Required
MarkLogic can store all your enterprise data in it's original format without needing to know a schema in advanced. You can shove pretty much any structured or unstructured data directly into MarkLogic, and it will automatically index everything and make it available for future processing. Of course it is fully schema aware and will apply and enforce schema constraints when available, but the tedious normalization that is required for relational databases is not necessary.
Cons
Con Error messages usually are not very detailed
When you are trying to do something in MySQL and something goes wrong it will simply give you an error message with an error code. Which does not say much about what went wrong unless you look it up online. This can be a little cumbersome during development.
Con Lack of experts
MarkLogic is not as popular as some of it's peers, and even though it is highly standards-based, the pool of talent that is well-versed in the underlying technology is small compared with some competing platforms (e.g, Oracle, IBM, Apache).
Con Enterprise software is not open source and can get expensive. Not for casual projects.
MarkLogic can be downloaded and implemented in development environments for free. However, for production use, it is priced for enterprises, not startups with tight budgets. Open source requires a lot more elbow grease to do the same thing.