UPDATED 16:40 EDT / OCTOBER 22 2014

Ken Krupa, Enterprise CTO, MarkLogic NEWS

When it comes to structured vs. unstructured data, MarkLogic says you can have it all | #BigDataNYC

Ken Krupa, Enterprise CTO, MarkLogic

Ken Krupa, Enterprise CTO, MarkLogic

The term NoSQL typically refers to a category of databases that address unstructured information more effectively than traditional  relational models, but MarkLogic Inc. wants it to take on an entirely different meaning.

“We don’t like to be be put in a silo; we like to redefine the boundaries of what a database should be,” said MarkLogic Enterprise CTO Ken Krupa in an interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at the recent BigDataNYC 2014 conference in New York City. The 13-year-old firm’s Not Only SQL database combines the query capabilities of both relational and non-relational architectures. “Search and database shouldn’t be two separate things,” Krups said. “If you’re putting your data in, you want to find it.”

Legacy systems such as Oracle weren’t built for search but rather for structured queries, which leaves users fretting over keywords and syntax. Non-relational databases are more flexible but lack the structure that is so useful in manipulating transactional information. MarkLogic combines the best of both worlds, according to Krupa, providing the freedom to choose the best tool for the job regardless without the preconceptions of the traditional data management world.

“SQL is a domain-specific language for asking a particular type of question provided you can visualize your data in rows and columns,” he explained. “What we say is that just because we don’t start out with rows and columns, let’s not limit ourselves to not being able to ask a SQL question.”

MarkLogic’s affair with defying traditional database design notions also extends to the ingestion phase, where Krupa said his firm’s platform eliminates the need for users to structure information before importing it into their deployments, as is the case with many non-relational alternatives. But users can also choose to normalize data beforehand for a more structured approach. Krupa  said it’s the best of both worlds.

He said MarkLogic allows users start ingesting unfamiliar data without having to plan how they’ll go about analyzing it upfront and, with time, add pre-optimizations as they see fit. The system, goes a step further when it comes to specific types of information such as key-value pairs, which its “decorates” with useful metadata about the contained values to streamline processing.

The combination of structured and unstructured query capabilities, storage optimization and everything else that the firm has thrown into the mix is not unique in the marketplace, but it is for a single solution, Krupa said. “Putting it all together is not as easy as people might think. If you have all these distant products – whether it’s Oracle and a number of acquisitions that they’ve made or finding what you can get from the open-source community – [it takes] a lot of time, costs and in many cases there’s a lot of brittleness associated with that.”

It’s a classic case of the whole exceeding the sum of its parts, the CTO summarized. The ability to wrangle different types of information within the same environment acts to eliminate much of the friction traditionally involved in the task, bringing the experience of querying for business data behind the firewall more up to par with searching Google. The gap is still wide, Krupa admitted, but MarkLogic is determined.

Watch the full interview (26:25)


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