MongoDB vs MarkLogic

Miles above other databases in educational resources.

MongoDB queries can be very fast because the data is usually all in one place and can easily be retrieved in a single lookup. But this is true only when the data is truly a document. When it's trying to emulate a relational model it starts to become really slow because it may have to perform many independent queries to retrieve a single document.

As Node.js uses JavaScript there's no need to map the returned JSON data from MongoDB, as JavaScript is a superset of JSON. Essentially solving object-relational impedance mismatch by its very nature. Working with JSON is also easier overall as it more easily fits into how you would represent data on the client.

Mongo is very flexible in that it doesn't require a unified data structure across all objects. So it's rather easy to use.

MongoDB has powerful sharding and scaling capabilities for when the data stored in the database gets so large that a single machine may not be able to store all of it. Sharding solves this problem through horizontal scaling. Mongo gives developers the ability to easily and painlessly add or remove as many machines as needed.

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.

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.

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.

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.