Attivio Springs to the Defense of MarkLogic
December 16, 2013
Through their blog, Attivio weighs in on the HealthCare.gov service: “Could IBM or Oracle Have Been the Miracle Cure for Healthcare.gov?” The telling subtitle is reads, “if you believe that, then I have a bridge to sell you.” Yes, Attivio comes out against pinning all the blame on a refusal to go with the tried and true (or outdated and limited, depending on one’s perspective.)
Senior Attivio marketing VP (and blogger) MaryAnne Sinville observes that the latest trend in the finger-pointing crusade is to assert that the site’s database component should have gone to an old stalwart like IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft instead of to the NoSQL firm MarkLogic. Not because those databases are better suited to the project, necessarily, but because it is easier to find technicians familiar with those systems.
Sinville writes:
“Does anyone really believe a better solution to a project involving many disparate sources of information, complex logic, and a dynamic interface, which must be built in a very short timeframe would have been to select IBM, Microsoft or Oracle? The idea that legacy mega-vendors have the agility required for a project of this scope is absurd, as the states of Oregon, Pennsylvania and the US Air Force have all recently learned the hard way.
Let’s take a look at the real issues at play here. Selecting a NoSQL database like MarkLogic, or more precisely in this case, an XML database, means that all of the Healthcare.gov data sources would have to be converted to XML. Of course that’s a monumental task, but it’s no more difficult and time consuming than the arduous extract, transform and load (ETL) processes required by traditional relational databases because of their fixed schema. The enormous time and cost associated with ETL is precisely why new technologies are emerging.”
For a nation that prides itself on innovation, we seem to have a lot of folks afraid of progress. Granted, Attivio has a stake in encouraging organizations to break away from traditional database providers. Still, I agree that a project this size called for the most up-to-date approach available. Let us turn our accusatory gaze from MarkLogic, which after all represents a small fraction of the vendors involved with this website, to where it belongs: on our government’s unwieldy and outdated procurement process. Granted, addressing that will be much tougher than assigning a scapegoat, but the approach has a singular advantage—it might actually fix a problem currently poised to cause us trouble for years to come.
Cynthia Murrell, December 16, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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