Usecases for marqo as database

Support
1

Hi everyone,

I want to know if the database tool Marqo.ai can also be used like a common database like SQL. Basically, I want it to replace a lot of Excel files. For example, there is an Excel file that holds the certifications for specific topics the employees have. There is another for current team memberships, another for special skills, another for reference projects and customer contacts, and so on.

So, I want to use Marqo.ai on one hand like an SQL database where I can say: give me all employees that started in 2024. But I also want to be able to ask: Who speaks Chinese and holds an ITIL certification? Or who did projects with customer X?

Additionally, I need some roles and rights management. Is this possible too?

Can I use Marqo.ai for that?

Thanks in advance for your help!

2

Hi @OneEyedBlackCatDevel! Marqo is not a relational database so you won’t be able to get all the functionality that SQL offers for data processing. Marqo is intended for search applications. I think it sounds like a SQL database might support some of your patterns better.

Marqo does have filtering which would support your example in a search setting, for example it might look something like:

mq.index(
    "my query", 
    filter_string="language:(chinese) AND itl_certification:(true)"
)

Assuming you had documents in Marqo that looked something like this:

{
    "_id" : "document1",
    "text": "some field with text",
    "language": "chinese",
    "itl_certification": True,
    ...
}

Role management from an end-user perspective is something you would need to implement over the top of Marqo - you could also restrict users access to data via filters.

For developer role access with Marqo you can isolate environments with accounts on Marqo Cloud, we have some more sophisticated features coming soon to the cloud platform to better support this.

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