Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2008
Microsoft last week announced the release to manufacturing of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, the latest version of the company’s data management and business intelligence platform, offering new capabilities such as support for policy-based management, auditing, large-scale data warehousing, geospatial data, and advanced reporting and analysis services. “Not only did we hit our schedule but we hit it with unprecedented quality,” Dan Jones, group program manager on the SQL Server Manageability team, observed during a teleconference.
“The SQL Server story is a great story in multiple dimensions,” Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data Platform and Storage Division, stated. It is the story of SQL Server product from 7.0, to 2000 to 2005 and “how we have advanced our data platform vision across these releases – going beyond just a relational database to a broader data platform with capabilities from OLTP to BI, delivered in a full range of products from desktop to server.” It is also, he said, the story of “SQL Server going from departmental to mission-critical, being different than the rest of the market with a focus on TCO but punctuated with 2005 now being able to deliver on applications from small to large to the most high-scale mission-critical workloads in the world.”
Describing SQL Server 2005 as a “big part” of the success of the platform, Kummert acknowledged that taking five years to bring that release to market was too long for customers. “We heard them on this and committed from there forward to a 24- to 36-month release cycle and that the next release of SQL Server would be available 24 to 36 months post-SQL Server 2005,” he said.
Also pointing to the popularity of SQL Server 2005, Jones said some customers may be wondering why they need to move to a new version. To make the case for the upgrade, Jones highlighted new features in a David Letterman-style list of top 10 reasons to upgrade, starting with number 10, easy installation and upgrade – and ending with the number-one reason to upgrade: Resource Governor. “Resource Governor eases the management of concurrent workloads by controlling the amount of CPU and memory utilization that those applications take up.”
Viewed alone each of the new features offers capabilities that customers haven't had in previous versions, “but taken together, the features in SQL Server 2008 offer unprecedented scalability, performance and productivity enhancements,” said Jones.
As previously announced, pricing for SQL Server will not increase with SQL Server 2008. SQL Server 2008 Express and SQL Server Compact editions are available for free download today. For more information, go here.
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Sybase Introduces Analytic Appliance
At the Sybase TechWave 2008 conference last week, the company announced the availability of the Sybase Analytic Appliance, which is intended to provide “extreme analytics” and alleviate overburdened data warehouses, data marts and reporting systems.
Sybase Analytic Appliance combines Sybase IQ column-based database, with other leading technologies including IBM Power Systems and MicroStrategy. “It also includes Sybase PowerDesigner for modeling your sources and then modeling the target into IQ if that is needed,” Dan Lahl, director of product marketing for Sybase IQ, told 5 Minute Briefing. “And then on top of that, we provide a management console for managing the whole environment.” The integrated console includes DBA and system management tools and provides GUIs for permissions, monitoring, diagnostics, trouble-shooting and other administrative functions. For companies that require zero-administration, remote management services are also available.
Sybase Analytic Appliance is available in three models - Series 100, Series 200 and Series 300 - depending on customer requirements. “The cool thing about working with IBM on this is it is not just three vanilla models,” said Lahl. “It is fully configurable. We have the 100 Series, the 200 series and the 300 series and you can configure up and down. It is not hard and fast on the configuration. We are trying to be as flexible as possible.”
Cost for the Sybase Analytic Appliance averages $27K per terabyte, “which is roughly half the price of Netezza and a quarter of the retail price on Teradata,” said Lahl. Sybase Analytic Appliance is sold and supported by systems integrator mLogica, an expert on IBM hardware, Sybase software and MicroStrategy business intelligence software. For more information go here.
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Oracle Unveils WebLogic Server 10g Release 3
Oracle, which completed the acquisition of BEA Systems at the end of April, has announced Oracle WebLogic Server 10g R3, combining technology from Oracle Fusion Middleware and BEA. Oracle WebLogic Server 10g R3 includes new features and capabilities, as well as integration with other Oracle Fusion Middleware products such as Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Coherence and Oracle TopLink, as well as Oracle Enterprise Manager.
It is significant that so soon after the BEA acquisition, Oracle has released “one of the strategic products within Oracle Fusion Middleware,” Mike Piech, senior director of product marketing for WebLogicServer, Tuxedo and related products at Oracle, told 5 Minute Briefing. “This is certainly one of the biggest and most important foundation products within the overall stack,” Piech noted. “That we continued and maintained on schedule the release of such a significant product is representative of the commitment, the energy and sheer investment that Oracle is putting into and maintaining in this product line.”
A key theme for the new release is continued support as the foundation for SOA. “Things that are fundamental to SOA and SOA-based applications are an important area of technological advance in this release of the product,” Piech said. Another theme, he added, is continued focus on manageability. Attention to the developer productivity and building applications is very important and attention has certainly been paid there, said Piech. But also, he noted, “when you really get down to it, a lot of what WebLogic Server is all about is managing large-scale mission-critical, make-or-break-the-business kinds of applications, and the ability to run those with performance, with reliability at scale, is incredibly important.”
Oracle WebLogic Server 10g R3 offers new support for Java SE 6, new security standards including SAML 2.0, WS-Security 1.1 and WS-SecurityPolicy 1.2, and, in Web services JAX-WS 2.1, WS-Reliable Messaging 1.1 and WS-Policy 1.5. Oracle WebLogic Server 10g R3 also offers a lighter-weight footprint, optional service startup, and faster startup, while the new FastSwap feature provides seamless and rapid develop-debug-test cycles. With this release, support for Spring developers is further expanded. The new HTTP publish-subscribe feature enables improved out-of-the-box capability for support of dynamically updated Web 2.0 style rich user interfaces; and support for Java SE 6 and JRockit Mission Control allows developers and end-users to get more performance and insight into application behavior and responsiveness. For more information, go here.
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Symantec Enhances Endpoint Virtualization with Acquisition of nSuite Technologies
Symantec Corp. has announced it is delivering expanded endpoint virtualization solutions to further protect and manage endpoints, whether physical, virtual or hybrid.
To support its endpoint virtualization portfolio, Symantec announced it is adding presentation virtualization and connection brokering technologies, through the acquisition of nSuite Technologies, a privately held virtual workspace management company. The acquisition is scheduled to close in August 2008. According to Sybase, connection broker technology is key to dynamically allocating traditional and virtual computing resources like information, user profiles and applications to the endpoint, regardless of device. Presentation virtualization allows users to view and interact with applications running remotely on a server, as if they are running on their local computing device.
The nSuite technologies will operate in conjunction with Symantec's Altiris Software Virtualization Solution Professional, which currently includes streaming and virtualization technology from Altiris and AppStream to provide faster, easier, and more manageable application consumption. It isolates applications and data from the base operating system allowing customers to instantly add, remove or reset applications on a Windows desktop, avoiding conflicts between applications or even between different versions of the same application.
Symantec's endpoint virtualization is designed to enable flexibility and productivity for end-users while helping to lower the cost of managing endpoint devices, Ken Berryman, vice president of Endpoint Virtualization for Symantec, told 5 Minute Briefing. "If you think about how virtualization has developed over the last few years, wave one focused on virtualizing specific point pieces of the technology stack. Wave two is focused on the information itself, on using a range of tools and technologies to decouple the information that matters - in the case of the endpoint, the user's experience and workspace - from the underlying systems," Berryman said. While most endpoints that are used in the enterprise today are PCs, laptops and desktops, observed Berryman, "increasingly, it is also PDAs, it may include some thin clients, it may include other types of devices that people bring in. We really want to include the full range of ways in which an individual person interacts with their working experience."
The expanded technology portfolio will enable rapid provisioning of anything from traditional desktops to full virtual desktops, while Symantec's existing streaming and virtualization products dynamically build the workspace on-demand for the user. For more on nSuite, go here.
For more on Altiris Software Virtualization Solution Professional, go here.
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CaoSys and ERP Seminars Introduce Enterprise Pack for SOD Solution
CaoSys, a developer of governance, risk, compliance (GRC) and productivity software specifically for Oracle E-Business Suite, and ERP Seminars, which specializes in the definition of internal controls and security best practices, have introduced an Enterprise Pack for the segregation of duties solution, CS*Comply from CaoSys. The CS*Comply Enterprise Pack (CS*Comply*EP) has been designed to help businesses deal with their segregation of duties issues. The solution contains a comprehensive conflict matrix consisting of more than 21,000 segregation of duties conflicts and conflict pairs.
Alongside the release of the Enterprise Pack, CaoSys has released a new version of CS*Comply, which includes a new SOD Conflict Scanning Engine (CSE), which can quickly scan an entire system consisting of hundreds or thousands of users across many hundreds of thousands or even millions of access combinations, the company said. “One of the major difficulties with any SOD solution is the sheer volume of data that has to be scanned in order to determine where SOD violations occur,” Craig O'Neill, founder and CEO of CaoSys Limited, told 5 Minute Briefing. “On a system with a thousand users across 500 responsibilities, there could be as many as a million access combinations that must be checked against each of the conflicts in the matrix. If the matrix contains a thousand entries then this could equate to a process that must perform more than a billion access checks.”
CS*Comply forms part of the CaoSys compliance toolkit which itself is part of the company's complete suite, CS*Applications. All Enterprise Packs, also known as E*Packs are delivered and installed onto a customers system using standard XML and are fully configurable and extensible. E*Packs consist of pre-built content designed to enable customers to get started quickly with its products. The first E*Pack, was introduced for the enterprise data auditing solution CS*Audit. More information regarding CS*Comply*EP and CS*Comply is available directly from the CaoSys here. For more on ERP Seminars, go here.
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