MARKLOGIC SERVER

DIRECTORY INDEXES
MarkLogic includes the notion of database "directories." They're similar to collections
but are hierarchical and non-overlapping and based on the unique document names,
which are technically URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Directories inside
MarkLogic behave a lot like filesystem directories: each contains an arbitrary number
of documents as well as subdirectories. Queries often impose directory constraints,
limiting a view to a specific directory or its subdirectories.
MarkLogic indexes directories a lot like collections. There's a term list for each
directory listing the documents in that directory. There's also a term list for each
directory listing the documents held in that directory or lower. That makes it a simple
matter of term list intersection to limit a view based on directory paths.
SECURITY INDEXES
MarkLogic's security model also leverages the intersecting term list system. MarkLogic
employs a role-based security model where each user is assigned any number of roles,
and these roles have associated permissions and privileges. The permissions control
what documents the user can read, insert, and update, and the privileges control what
actions the user can perform (e.g., restarting the server). The implementation of most
security checks is simple: just make sure that the user has the necessary credentials
before granting the requested action. So where does the intersecting term list
system come in?
MarkLogic uses term lists to manage document reads, because reads support queries and
queries have to operate at scale. You don't want to check document read permissions one
at a time. Each role has a term list for what documents that role is allowed to see. As part
of each query that's issued, MarkLogic combines the user's explicit constraints with the
implicit visibility constraints of the invoking user's roles. If the user account has three
roles, MarkLogic gathers the term lists for each role, and unions those together to create
that user's universe of documents. It intersects this list with any ad hoc query the user
runs, to make sure the results only display documents in that user's visibility domain.
Implicitly and highly efficiently, every user's worldview is shaped based on their security
settings, all using term lists.
MarkLogic can also provide "compartment security." In this system it's not enough
that a user have a role that can view a document the user needs to have all necessary
roles to view a document. Imagine a document that involves several top-secret projects.
You can't read it unless you have visibility to all the top-secret projects. Internally, with
security, the term lists for role visibility are intersected (ANDed) instead of
unioned (ORed). 2
2 MarkLogic security has been evaluated and validated in accordance with the provisions of the National
Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) Common Criteria Evaluation and Validation Scheme (CCEVS) for
IT Security. It's the only NoSQL database to have done so.
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