Embarcadero Technologies has introduced a new version of its database management and development platform, DB Power Studio XE3, which offers enhancements to further improve the performance and availability of databases.

Plans are underway for an event specifically focused on Sybase PowerBuilder and tools that will be separate from TechEd but held at the same time and location, according to Christine Weber, marketing manager, Events, at Sybase, an SAP company. There will also be close to 100 hours of sessions specifically focused on Sybase database and analytics products at SAP TechEd 2012, Weber tells 5 Minute Briefing. "It is a good portion and it is focused on the traditional kind of content that we have always done with Sybase." Sybase-specific content will include tips and tricks on how to use existing products, as well as previews of what's ahead in new product releases. Now that the call for papers has closed, Sybase is going through its approval process for the presentations. Well over 200 presentations were submitted - "a good problem to have," Weber notes.

It seems only reasonable that what one person can do, others can learn. On the other hand, taking people through training does not usually result in the creation of great new database administrators (DBAs). It often appears as if those who are exceptional at the craft operate at higher levels as they dive into a problem. Can training alone provide folks with the attention to detail, the urge to keep digging, or the ability to recall minutiae that allow them to rise from simply holding the DBA title to becoming someone who is a great DBA? Or must the genetic potential exist first, and then one might fall into the DBA occupation and astound those around them. It is very hard to say with any degree of certainty whether great DBAs are made or born; yet again the battle between nature and nurture arises.

Embarcadero Technologies has introduced a new version of its database management and development platform, DB Power Studio XE3, which offers enhancements to further improve the performance and availability of databases.

10gen, the company behind MongoDB, has announced its support for MongoDB with Node.js. This includes an official Node.js driver as well as commercial support from 10gen for MongoDB-backed applications developed with Node.js. Node.js joins the existing set of programming languages and environments 10gen supports, including Java, PHP, C#, Ruby, Python, C++, C, Perl, Scala, Haskell and Erlang. Launched in 2009 and sponsored by Joyent, JavaScript-based Node.js is designed to help developers build data-intensive, real-time applications that support large numbers of concurrent users and devices.

Quest Software has released version 11.5 of its Toad for Oracle software, the flagship product in the Toad portfolio of productivity software for database developers, DBAs, and analysts. Drawing on community feedback from their two million users, Quest has introduced a number of new features and improvements, most notably a new social intelligence component. Toad for Oracle 11.5, Quest contends, will allow users to take advantage of the best ideas and practices from the community and further increase user productivity.

Sybase has announced that Ford Motor Company will centralize all of its logical and physical modeling functions with SAP Sybase PowerDesigner, the data modeling software and metadata management solution for data, information, and enterprise architectures. The solution provides the capability to generate Data Description Language (DDL) for Ford Motor Company's database platforms, including all of the leading databases like Sybase ASE, DB2, SQL Server, Teradata and Oracle.

Solution development work is usually accomplished via projects, or a combination of programs and projects. This project perspective often leads to thoughts of documentation as project-owned. And while many documents are project-specific, such as timelines, resource plans, and such, not everything is project-specific. Unless projects are established in a fashion whereby each is very limited in scope to the creation or enhancement of a single application or system, specification and design documents belong to the final solution and not to the project.

1010data, Inc., provider of an internet-based big data warehouse, has announced the launch of a new software tool that enables 1010data's customers to automatically segment and analyze huge consumer transaction databases and produce statistical models with specificity, even to the level of social groups, families and individuals. For the first stage of the launch, 1010data is making the tool available in an invitational beta release for retail, consumer goods, and mobile telecom companies. "In all consumer-driven industries, customers are demanding to be treated as individuals, not boomers, tweeners, or dinks - dual income, no kids," said Tim Negris, vice president of marketing at 1010data.

Solution development work is usually accomplished via projects, or a combination of programs and projects. This project perspective often leads to thoughts of documentation as project-owned. And while many documents are project-specific, such as timelines, resource plans, and such, not everything is project-specific. Unless projects are established in a fashion whereby each is very limited in scope to the creation or enhancement of a single application or system, specification and design documents belong to the final solution and not to the project.

Kalido, a provider of agile information management software, unveiled the latest release of the Kalido Information Engine, which helps organizations decrease the time for data mart migrations and consolidations. With this new release, customers will be able to import existing logical and physical models and taxonomies to build a more agile data warehouse. Enabling customers to take advantage of existing assets and investments "is going to dramatically reduce the time and the cost that it takes to bring together data marts into more of a data warehouse scenario," says John Evans, director of product marketing at Kalido.

Kalido, a provider of agile information management software, unveiled the latest release of the Kalido Information Engine, which helps organizations decrease the time for data mart migrations and consolidations. With this new release, customers will be able to import existing logical and physical models and taxonomies to build a more agile data warehouse. Enabling customers to take advantage of existing assets and investments "is going to dramatically reduce the time and the cost that it takes to bring together data marts into more of a data warehouse scenario," says John Evans, director of product marketing at Kalido.

In this, our last E-Edition of Database Trends and Applications for 2011, we're taking a look back at some of the most widely read articles of the past year. These articles cover a range of topics. Some provide an examination of just-emerging or quickly evolving technologies, others highlight best practices in a specific discipline, while others comment on trends observed by industry experts. Click on the "December 2011 E-Edition UPDATE" headline above to access the articles. If you missed one earlier in the year, here's your second chance. All DBTA E-Editions are archived by month on the DBTA website.

The cost for new development can often be easily justified. If a new function is needed, staffing a team to create such functionality and supporting data structures can be quantified and voted up or down by those controlling resources. Money can be found to build those things that move the organization forward; often, the expense may be covered by savings or increased revenue derived from providing the new services.

It is not magic. Building a successful IT solution takes time. And that time is used in various ways: obtaining an understanding of the goal; mapping out what components are necessary and how those components interact; testing components and their interaction; and finally migrating those components into the production environment - otherwise known as analysis, design, development, testing, and deployment. Regardless of the methodology employed, these functions must always be addressed. Different approaches focus on differing needs and aspects. But any complete methodology must fill in all the blanks for accomplishing each of these tasks.

When assembling a database design, one of the keys for success is consistency. There should be more than just similarity in the way things are named, the manner in which tables or groups of tables are constructed; the manifestation of these elements should follow standards and practices that are documented and understood. If one tries to rely on the idea that individual developers will simply look at existing tables and glean standards via osmosis as they add on or create new tables, then one does not actually have any standards at all.

HP is offering a series of new software solutions designed to improve collaboration among application development and delivery teams. The new HP ALM software solutions include HP Service Virtualization 1.0, HP Application Lifecycle Intelligence (ALI), and HP Agile Accelerator 5.0. "Without a performance management system, it's difficult to measure success," Matthew Morgan, senior director of worldwide product marketing at HP Software, said at a press and blogger briefing at launch day for the product line. Application metrics "should be digitized and automated, and not sit on an Excel desktop."

Rally, a vendor in Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) and a Gold-level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork, has announced that Rally Enterprise Edition 2011.2 has achieved Oracle Validated Integration with Oracle's Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) 8. The integration will allow project managers to more easily view and analyze critical data from Agile development teams, enabling them to adjust investment priorities in the organization's portfolio of IT projects.

WhereScape, developer of WhereScape RED, an agile IDE for managing data warehouses, has introduced WhereScape 3D, a data-driven design tool for planning and reality-testing data warehousing and business intelligence projects. According to the vendor, using WhereScape 3D, organizations are able to reduce project risk by planning accurate, user-tested projects up front, in hours or days rather than weeks or months.

Occasionally, one sees a data structure abomination. This atrocity involves an object of almost any type, in almost any database wherein the object has a start date but no end date. It is not that the finish date currently has no value and is null; it is that the end date does not even exist on the table structure. The stop date was never intended to exist. The object in question starts, but it doesn't ever end.

Alpine Data Labs, developer of Alpine Miner, a solution for big data predictive analytics, has received $7.5 million in Series A funding. In addition, after 15 months of product development, the company also announced its 10th production customer and its formal launch in the U.S. market. According to Anderson Wong, Alpine Labs CEO and co-founder, organizations cannot extract all the possible value from their data because it is growing faster than they can analyze it, they don't have enough resources with analytics expertise, and the tools they're using are too complex to get to the answers they need quickly.

Oracle has submitted a proposal to the Eclipse Foundation to create a Hudson project in Eclipse and contribute the Hudson core code to that project. Hudson is a industry-leading open source "continuous integration" (CI) server that increases productivity by coordinating and monitoring executions of repeated jobs, making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project and for users to obtain a fresh build.

Dates are important. Without dates how can anything be planned? However, due dates have been know to increase in importance in the delivery of software solutions. Sometimes the due date becomes such an overwhelming creature of importance that the date is more important than following best practices, more important than verifying that what is built is correct, more important than the solution team gaining a proper understanding of the work they are attempting to perform.

Embarcadero has introduced DB PowerStudio for DB2 to provide DB2 developers and DBAs with a toolset that brings greater functionality and efficiency to their development, database administration and performance tuning tasks. According to Embarcadero, the new DB PowerStudio for DB2 combines several essential database tools into an aggressively priced suite that extends beyond the capabilities of IBM's database utilities. Following recent introductions of similar toolsets aimed at Oracle, SQL Server and Sybase ASE users, DB PowerStudio for DB2 meets the needs of both DB2 database developers and administrators, helping both improve the performance and availability of their databases.

The understanding of object states and their transitions obviously is of great importance to the solution developers because as processes are built they will need to support each state and every possible transition. Additionally, knowledge of object states and transitions is of vital importance to the data modeler because the data must be persisted across each of those states, and often the state of an object needs to be easily identifiable. A data model minimally requires a reference table, along with the varying entities that reference that table (the foreign keys tracking an individual object's status). Specific states drive variations of required attributes or combinations of those attributes that apply to one state and not another. The logical definition of the database can identify these variations through the use of supertype/subtype constructs.

CA Erwin Data Modeler r8, a solution for collaboratively visualizing and managing data across multiple systems, was announced by CA Technologies. Enhanced visualization and different ways to visualize data models in non-traditional formats is a main theme of the release, Donna Burbank, senior director of marketing, Data Management, CA Technologies, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The goal is to help ERwin, an established product with a 20-plus-year track record, to reach new audiences, in particular, business and non-technical users, as well as to provide improved workflow for traditional CA Erwin Data Modeler users.

CA Technologies says it is now shipping a toolset for collaboratively visualizing and managing data across multiple systems. The product, CA Erwin Data Modeler r8, offers enhanced visualization and different ways to visualize data models in non-traditional formats. "We completely ripped out our old user interface and put in a new one," Donna Burbank, senior director of marketing, Data Management, CA Technologies, tells 5 Minute Briefing. With features like graphics, themes, fonts, and auto layout, she observes, "It is really more like a drawing tool on the front with the power of a data modeling tool behind it."

A new toolset designed to streamline common and complex tasks associated with developing, administering and optimizing Oracle databases, has been announced by Embarcadero. The new toolset, called DB PowerStudio for Oracle, combines several of Embarcadero's most popular database tools into a suite that is intended to make it easier for Oracle developers and DBAs to shorten database development and administration times, and to improve the performance and availability of their databases. The toolset is available in a Developer Edition and a DBA Edition.

CA Erwin Data Modeler r8, a solution for collaboratively visualizing and managing data across multiple systems, was announced by CA Technologies. Enhanced visualization and different ways to visualize data models in non-traditional formats is a main theme of the release, Donna Burbank, senior director of marketing, Data Management, CA Technologies, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The goal is to help ERwin, an established product with a 20-plus-year track record, to reach new audiences, in particular, business and non-technical users, as well as provide improved workflow for traditional CA Erwin Data Modeler users. "We completely ripped out our old user interface and put in a new one," says Burbank. With features like graphics, themes, fonts, and auto layout, she observes, "It is really more like a drawing tool on the front with the power of a data modeling tool behind it."