What's New in MarkLogic 11

MarkLogic 11.3 is the first Long Term Support (LTS) Release of MarkLogic Server. Per the Progress Lifecycle, an LTS release is the start of a four-year Active life cycle phase, counting down to the release entering the Sunset life cycle phase. The duration of the Sunset Phase for LTS releases is fixed at two years, after which the release moves to the Retired life cycle phase. Active phase releases are fully supported. If problems are found using an Active phase release, Progress will work with customers towards an appropriate resolution if they are covered by active maintenance and support services.

LTS releases in the Sunset Phase are fully supported and will be evaluated by Progress for certifications on new operating environments, but not for ports to new hardware systems. If problems are found using product releases in the Sunset Phase, Progress will work with customers towards an appropriate resolution where possible if their licenses are covered by active maintenance and support services. This includes the possibility of an Update at the discretion of Progress.

MarkLogic 11.3 includes a number of enhancements to the way the optimizer in the Optic engine works. Prior to 11.3, the optimizer uses a random seed to begin the optimization process. This can potentially result in the optimizer choosing different plans for the same query, causing fluctuations in the query execution time. In MarkLogic 11.3, the optimizer uses a fixed seed which should result in much more stable selection of query plans and therefore, query performance for the same query.

MarkLogic 11.3 also introduces a configurable timeout for the Optic plan cache. Prior to MarkLogic 11.3, this timeout is a fixed at 256 seconds which can result in considerable variation of query performance for user-facing queries. MarkLogic 11.3 introduced the group-level “Optimized Plan Cache Timeout” setting. This setting defaults to 256 seconds but can be set to larger values to reduce the impact that query optimization time can have on query performance.

Prior to MarkLogic 11.3, CTS queries used in an Optic where or fromSearch (for example) operator that include a large number of OR or AND terms have a significant execution overhead. MarkLogic 11.3 adds an optimization for handling serialization of large CTS queries that improves performance for these types of Optic queries.

MarkLogic 11.3 removes support for "legacy" stemming and tokenizers that were deprecated with the release of MarkLogic 9 in 2017 (see the MarkLogic 9 Known Incompatibilities with Previous Releases documentation). The libraries that support the "legacy" option for the cluster-level language baseline setting are completely removed in MarkLogic 11.3.0 and later. The libraries are provided by a 3rd party who have decided to end-of-life the product. Therefore, the libraries can no longer be distributed with MarkLogic Server. 

Clusters configured to use the legacy language baseline must switch to the "ml9" language baseline and reindex  prior to upgrading to MarkLogic 11.3. This is a cluster-level setting which can be seen via the cluster configuration page in the Admin Interface or via the cluster properties returned from the REST api. All new databases created with MarkLogic 9 or later use the "ml9" baseline so, only those clusters created with MarkLogic 8 or earlier and upgraded without converting the baseline to "ml9" would be affected. 

When upgrading to MarkLogic 11.3, if the cluster is still configured to use the “legacy” language baseline, the upgrade will fail to complete. MarkLogic 11.3 will not allow the upgrade to be committed if the “legacy” language baseline is in use. If this is encountered, downgrade to 11.2 or earlier, change to the "ml9" language baseline and force a reindex of all databases. Once the reindex is complete and the system has been adequately tested, upgrade to 11.3.

Due to the end of life of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, the existing CentOS 7 MarkLogic virtual machine images on the Azure marketplace will no longer be supported. They are replaced with new images base on the latest Rocky Linux 8 base image.