Tableau Software Inc.’s ecosystem partners rave about the value Tableau adds to their products. One such partner, MarkLogic Corp., describes itself as “the only enterprise-level noSQL database out there.” Joe Pasqua, MarkLogic’s VP of Product Development explains that Tableau and MarkLogic work together so well because they both collect data and find new ways to use it. While at the Tableau Data 14 conference, he spoke with Jeff Kelly on theCUBE about how the two companies partner to provide clients with a more comprehensive view of their data.

MarkLogic has the “agility and power of noSQL,” but can still accommodate the capabilities and characteristic that enterprises have accumulated and come to rely on “over the past 30 years in the database space,” said Pasqua.

They leverage a decade of experience to figure out the edge cases and make their product work. Because MarkLogic began as a company that wanted to provide agility and work with traditional characteristics, those aspects are “built into the system,” Pasqua explained. The MarkLogic technology was built based on that decision, not retrofitted to meet customers needs. Pasqua went on to say that MarkLogic uses “search technology combined with database technology” as its core design pillar.

How customers use MarkLogic

MarkLogic clients that get the most value out of the technology tend to have one of two goals in mind:

1. Content delivery
In the publishing and media industries, MarkLogic helps take diverse content from a vast variety of sources and aggregate it all together. That way, it’s easy for clients to search through the content and construct “new content composed of all these different components.”

2. Heterogeneous data integration
Many organizations have huge amounts of data stored in different formats and different systems. MarkLogic is able to bring it all together and let clients manipulate and better understand their data.

While these two use cases are distinct, Pasqua pointed out, “the underlying problem is the same.” MarkLogic clients seek a schema-agnostic tool that enables them to bring “lots of systems, lots of diverse data” together in one place to enable a more holistic view.

Founders Online: a Tableau-MarkLogic Use Case

Pasqua shared a MarkLogic project that made particularly interesting use of Tableau: the website Founders Online. It was created by a joint group of government entities and the University of Virginia to collect all the writings of the founding fathers. Using Tableau and MarkLogic, the website does more than just enable visitors to search and read through these writings. Founders Online also lets users hone in on a particular figure and “look at his writing level over time” or by subject. Through Tableau’s visualization techniques and MarkLogic’s ability to tie unstructured data to numerical data, Founders Online offers unique insights and historical context.

Riding the Tableau train

Pasqua said that at the conference, the “interest level is inescapable” and that it was clear that Tableau is “driving tremendous interest in the marketplace.” Companies get excited about Tableau because, Pasqua said, it helps them derive more value from their data by framing it as a narrative.

For MarkLogic, Tableau is compelling because it amplifies MarkLogic’s abilities. Pasqua also mentioned that is looking forward to see what comes out of Tableau’s investments in R&D. “There’s so much more that can be done,” he said. He’s looking to Tableau to make their tools even more intuitive and to broaden the types of data the can be accessed.

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