MarkLogic Corp. is previewing version 9 of its namesake NoSQL database at its MarkLogic World conference in San Francisco this week, touting new data integration, security and manageability capabilities.

MarkLogic targets enterprises with government-grade security and high availability features. Entity services in version 9 attacks a weakness of relational databases by giving developers a semantic model of key entities and the relationships between them.

“You can actually describe what entities are, such as ‘This is what a customer is and how it relates to other entities,'” said Joe Pasqua, executive vice president of products. “Today all the focus is on a low-level schema and all that information is encoded into the app. We’re capturing that in the database to make data more valuable.”

Also new in this release is Optic API, a query mechanism that enables developers to combine documents, triples and rows flexibly across entities, preform aggregations and project data in different views. “We’re a NoSQL document database, but sometimes you want to use a relational or semantic front-end, and that’s what this is for,” Pasqua said. “You can store data in one model and view it in several others.” Queries using the Optic API are said to be faster thanks to a new underlying index and distributed execution across a cluster. The company also enhanced integration between data from the MarkLogic database and existing SQL tools.

Focus on security

Security improvements include an advanced encryption capability using standards-based cryptography, advance key management and regular separation of duties. New redaction features prevent the exposure of sensitive information by either removing existing information or replacing it with other values. The technique is often used to protect privacy, particularly in regulated industries.

Element-level security allows specific elements or properties of XML and JSON documents to be hidden from particular users, providing a more granular level of security than the current document-level protection. Permissions can be specified down to the element level in JSON or XML formats.

Also on the security front, the vendor announced a licensing and technology partnership with Cryptsoft Pty Ltd., an Australian vendor of enterprise key management security. MarkLogic will embed Cryptsoft’s Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) technology into MarkLogic 9, giving customers access to a key storage and management suite that’s compliant with the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (Oasis).

Earlier this year, MarkLogic achieved Common Criteria Security Certification for compliance with the International Standards Organization standard (ISO/IEC 15408) used by governments and other organizations to assess the security capabilities of technology products. MarkLogic said it’s the only enterprise NoSQL vendor to receive certification and one of just six database vendors overall.

A new management suite called Ops Director enables database administrators to manage multiple MarkLogic 9 clusters from a single pane of glass across cloud and distributed systems, as well as across production, test and development environments. Upgrades can now be done on a rolling basis, with each cluster updating in succession but only going live when all databases on the network have been updated. MarkLogic can also now proactively discover, fix and alert customers to many potential performance and uptime issues.

MarkLogic’s “Essential Enterprise” edition is priced at  $18,000 a per year or $32,000 for a perpetual license. The Global Enterprise edition is priced on a custom quotation basis.