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(Editor’s note: This dispatch is part of a series profiling start-ups that are having success in the area of “big data,” a catchall for the massive growth in storage capacity and processing power needed to manage large volumes of data.)

flickr: juhansonin

Venture capitalists have been in a frenzy the last few years funding start-ups selling NoSQL databases, a favorite toy of Web companies because they’re more flexible than more established database management systems.

MarkLogic often gets lumped in with that group because like NoSQL its database doesn’t use rows and columns and has other characteristics that make it adaptable to multiple types of data. But its product, around longer than NoSQL, registers changes to the database immediately and consistently, whereas most NoSQL products sacrifice this stability for the ability to scale across multiple machines, since that was the more desirable characteristic for Web companies like Google and Facebook.

Founded in 2001, MarkLogic has something else none of the NoSQL companies have yet–significant revenue. It expects to finish the year with over $85 million in revenue, up from about $55 million last year, with almost all the growth coming from new software licenses, rather than support, Bado said.

Here’s a snapshot of the company:

MarkLogic Corp., San Carlos, Calif.

Funding: The company has raised $45 million over the last eight years from Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital.

What it does: MarkLogic’s database was designed for unstructured data, like documents, video or any data that doesn’t fit nicely into rows and columns, so customers can build applications without knowing exactly what the data might look like or how they will be formatted.

Most of its customers come to MarkLogic looking for transaction processing, rather than analytics, but both can be done on the same database, without the need to pull the data into a separate data warehouse before running analytics—an expensive and necessary step for analyzing data from a traditional database.

How it’s been used: JPMorgan Chase & Co. uses MarkLogic at the heart of its derivatives processing. Derivatives have more complexity than a ticker symbol and a price, so don’t play well with databases designed for structured data.

Before bringing in MarkLogic, the bank modeled a dozen or so databases—a separate one to serve each of the functions, such as settlement, affirmations, matching and accounting, that it uses the data for. It also had to make the same number of copies of the data to service each database.

The competition: Most of its sales come from dislodging Oracle Corp. In early conversations, customers often doubt that MarkLogic can do what it claims to do, said Chief Executive Ken Bado. “Those customers will give Oracle the benefit of the doubt two or three times and then call in MarkLogic.”

It  also competes with Hadoop–an open-source project built mainly at Yahoo Inc. that, like MarkLogic, specializes in unstructured data and is being commercialized by several early-stage start-ups. Unlike Hadoop, MarkLogic is built for real-time operational data, rather than just analysis.

Where its goes from here: It got its start in digital publishing and moved into government intelligence shortly after, but the biggest growth opportunity it sees in front of it is in financial services, Bado said. “It’s global in nature, there’s lots of money and people are looking to get a competitive edge.”