BonitaSoft, a provider of business process management (BPM) solutions, has announced Bonita BMP 6, a platform upgrade that gives business users and IT professionals an advanced set of BMP tools to enhance collaboration, drive end-user efficiency and improve processes quickly. Up to four times faster than the current generation, BPM 6 includes a host of new features that make people, departments and organizations more efficient through the use of intuitive process-driven applications. New features include a redesigned user portal, mobile access and improve business activity monitoring.

Garantia Data, the provider of enterprise-class Redis Cloud and Memcached Cloud services, has announced a new Multi-Availability Zone capability that affords a greater level of high-availability to its Redis Cloud and Memcached Cloud hosting services on AWS. Offering constant dataset replication to a different availability zone (data center) and an instant auto-failover mechanism, this solution guarantees that data is served without interruption in case of a complete or partial outage of the data center.

Oracle announced the general availability of MySQL Cluster 7.3, which adds foreign key support, a new NoSQL JavaScript Connector for node.js, and an auto-installer to make setting up clusters easier. MySQL Cluster is an open source, auto-sharded, real-time, ACID-compliant transactional database with no single point of failure, designed for advanced web, cloud, social and mobile applications. "Foreign key support has been a longstanding feature request from day-one," Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering at Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Datawatch Corporation, a provider of information optimization solutions, has agreed to acquire Panopticon Software AB, a privately held Swedish company specializing in the delivery of real-time visual data discovery solutions. The transaction is expected to be completed before the end of Datawatch's fiscal year September 30. The acquisition of Panopticon adds additional capabilities for Datawatch that are important in the big data space, Ben Plummer, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Datawatch, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Software AG has agreed to acquire Apama, a platform for complex event processing (CEP) and CEP-powered solutions, from Progress Software. Apama CEP allows organizations to correlate and analyze business activities across multiple data streams in real-time and take immediate action in response. "Data can lose its value in an instant," said Robin Gilthorpe, CEO of Software AG's Terracotta and member of the Software AG Group Executive Board. "This acquisition is a major step in delivering on our strategy of empowering enterprises to derive meaningful business insights and value from big data."

Composite Software has released the Composite Data Virtualization Platform 6.2 SP3. This release really has four elements, Robert Eve, executive vice president of marketing, Composite, tells 5 Minute Briefing. It updates the Hortonworks, Cloudera and the Apache Distribution of Hadoop big data integrations through the HiveServer2 interface, and then fourth, provides new access to Cloudera CDH through Impala. "The key problem with big data is that there are not enough people that are skilled at the big data tools to use them effectively," Eve notes.

The result of collaboration between hundreds of engineers from more than 30 companies within the Java Community Process (JCP) and the GlassFish Community, the new Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE 7) as well as the Java EE 7 Software Development Kit (SDK) was announced by Oracle and JCP members at a launch webcast. The new release has three main themes, said Cameron Purdy, vice president for development at Oracle. They are support for building HTML5 applications, enhancements for greater developer productivity, and new features that address enterprise requirements.

Dell and Oracle have announced an expanded worldwide alliance, through which the two companies will introduce a new x86 infrastructure offering that combines Dell's hardware with Oracle's software. As part of the agreement, Oracle has named Dell a preferred x86 partner, and Dell has named Oracle a preferred enterprise infrastructure partner, including Oracle Linux. The expanded partnership represents an extension of Oracle's engineered systems strategy, said Oracle president Mark Hurd.

In a new blog, Jean Staten Healy, Director, Wordwide Linux and Open Virtualization, IBM, observes that open source hypervisor KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is gaining ground in the enterprise. According to Staten Healy, the trajectory of enterprise adoption of KVM is reminiscent of the early days of Linux since organizations, by now familiar with server virtualization, are evaluating not only hypervisors from the current market leaders but also open source approaches.

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These are heady times for data products vendors and their enterprise customers. When business leaders talk about success these days, they often are alluding to a new-found appreciation for their data environments. It can even be said that the tech vendors that are making the biggest difference in today's business world are no longer software companies at all; rather, they are "data" companies, with all that implies. Enterprises are reaching out to vendors for help in navigating through the fast-moving, and often unforgiving, digital realm. The data vendors that are leading their respective markets are those that know how to provide the tools, techniques, and hand-holding needed to manage and sift through gigabytes', terabytes', and petabytes' worth of data to extract tiny but valuable nuggets of information to guide business leaders as to what they should do next.

Mike Ruane, president and CEO of Revelation Software will demonstrate O4W (OpenInsight for Web) Mobile at user group meetings and conferences across the country and the U.K. this summer and early fall. In the presentations, Ruane's team will show attendees how easy it is to build a mobile application with Revelation's software by actually allowing them to build a mobile pizza-ordering application, Robert Catalano, director of sales at Revelation, tells DBTA.

When NoSQL first hit the IT consciousness in 2009, an explosion of NoSQL databases seemed to appear out of thin air. Some of these contenders had in fact been around for some time, with others thrown together rather quickly to exploit the NoSQL buzz. The NoSQL pack thinned out as leaders in specific categories emerged, but for some time, there was no clear leading key-value NoSQL database.

Computer games have been front-runners in many important developments in the IT industry, including digital distribution, cloud storage, user driven design, and crowd sourcing. So it's not surprising that game developers are in a leading position when it comes to big data analytics and machine learning. Online games have the ability to monitor all aspects of player behavior, so, just as Google is able to refine your search results by analyzing your previous searches and comparing them to the billions of searches done every day, online game companies are able to modify game behavior to ensure a more optimal game experience by observing what works - and what doesn't - in the gamer's world.

The grain of a fact table is derived by the dimensions with which the fact is associated. For example, should a fact have associations with a Day dimension, a Location dimension, a Customer dimension, and a Product dimension, then the usual assumption would be for the fact to be described as being at a "by Day," "by Location," "by Customer," "by Product" metrics level. Evidence of this specific level of granularity for the fact table is seen by the primary key of the fact being the composite of the Day dimension key, Location dimension key, Customer dimension key, and Product dimension key. However, this granularity and these relationships are easily disrupted.

Although storage management can be an afterthought for the DBA, it really shouldn't be. Storage issues are vitally important and unless managed appropriately, it can be very costly. The cost of managing storage can be as much as 10 times higher than the initial cost of acquiring the storage—and the growth rate for disk storage was 37% between 1996 and 2007. Even so, it is common for storage-related issues to be relegated to the backburner by DBAs, but every database professional should understand modern storage basics.

When you decide to undertake your own benchmarking project, it's a strongly recommended best practice to write up a benchmarking plan. A benchmark must produce results that are both reliable and repeatable so that we can foster conclusions that are predictable and actionable. Keeping the "reliable and repeatable" mantra in mind necessitates a few extra steps.