At the TDWI 2012 Conference, Jaspersoft, a business intelligence (BI) software provider, announced an upgraded OEM agreement with Talend to include native connectors to Apache Hadoop big data environments in Jaspersoft ETL. With this enhanced ETL offering, Jaspersoft offers CIOs, data scientists, and BI builders the flexibility of three options to harness big data - direct reporting, direct real-time analysis, and batch analysis through ETL data mart access. "Today's data scientists want options to explore data faster," says Karl Van den Bergh, Jaspersoft's vice president of Product and Alliances.

Oracle has introduced MySQL Cluster 7.2, which is designed to cost-effectively deliver high availability, high write scalability and low latency for demanding web-based and communications products and services. "The performance and flexibility enhancements in MySQL Cluster 7.2 provide users with a solid foundation for their mission-critical web workloads, blending the best of SQL and NoSQL technologies to reduce risk, cost and complexity," says Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering, Oracle.

Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Advanced Analytics, a new option for Oracle Database 11g that combines Oracle R Enterprise with Oracle Data Mining. According to Oracle, Oracle R Enterprise delivers enterprise class performance for users of the R statistical programming language, increasing the scale of data that can be analyzed by orders of magnitude using Oracle Database 11g.

Lectures related to master data bring forth all sorts of taxonomies intended to help clarify master data and its place within an organization. Sliding scales may be presented: at the top, not master data; at the bottom, very much master data; in the middle, increasing degrees of "master data-ness." For the longest of times everyone thought metadata was confusing enough ... oops, we've done it again. And, we have accomplished the establishment of this master data semantic monster in quite a grand fashion.

Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Advanced Analytics, a new option for Oracle Database 11g that combines Oracle R Enterprise with Oracle Data Mining. According to Oracle, Oracle R Enterprise delivers enterprise class performance for users of the R statistical programming language, increasing the scale of data that can be analyzed by orders of magnitude using Oracle Database 11g.

Composite Software has added access to RainStor's Big Data management database, expanding the list of popular enterprise applications it now supports, including Oracle, SAP, and salesforce.com, as well as relational and multi-dimensional data sources from IBM, IBM Netezza, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP BW, SAP Sybase and Teradata.

Today's organizations must capture, track, analyze and store more information than ever before - everything from mass quantities of transactional, online and mobile data, to growing amounts of "machine-generated data" such as call detail records, gaming data or sensor readings. And just as volumes are expanding into the tens of terabytes, and even the petabyte range and beyond, IT departments are facing increasing demands for real-time analytics. In this era of "big data," the challenges are as varied as the solutions available to address them. How can businesses store all their data? How can they mitigate the impact of data overload on application performance, speed and reliability? How can they manage and analyze large data sets both efficiently and cost effectively?

Lectures related to master data bring forth all sorts of taxonomies intended to help clarify master data and its place within an organization. Sliding scales may be presented: at the top, not master data; at the bottom, very much master data; in the middle, increasing degrees of "master data-ness." For the longest of times everyone thought metadata was confusing enough ... oops, we've done it again. And, we have accomplished the establishment of this master data semantic monster in quite a grand fashion.

Many types of data change over time, and different users and applications have requirements to access data at different points in time. A traditional DBMS stores data that is implied to be valid at the current point-in-time, it does not track the past or future states of the data. For some, the current, up-to-date values for the data are sufficient. But for others, accessing earlier versions of the data is needed. Temporal support makes it possible to store different database states and to query the data "as of" those different states.

InterSystems Corporation, a provider of advanced database, integration and analytics technologies, announced it has become ISO 9001:2008 certified. ISO 9001:2008 is a quality management standard, and for InterSystems, the certification covers all processes related to the product and service creation associated with the InterSystems CACHÉ high-performance database and InterSystems Ensemble integration and development platform that are performed or managed from InterSystems' Cambridge-based headquarters.

Ntirety, Inc. announced that it has been successfully audited and certified under the MSPAlliance's (MSPA) Unified Certification Standard for Cloud and Managed Service Providers (UCS). The certification is specifically designed to provide business consumers of cloud and managed services with the assurance that the service provider they hire will meet or exceed the highest principles of quality in areas such as financial stability, facilities, managed services practices, and customer satisfaction.

KXEN, a provider of predictive analytics for business users, has certified its flagship product, InfiniteInsight, for Sybase IQ v.15, the column-based analytics server. The combination of the two solutions allows businesses to gain speed and performance in building predictive models and social network analysis to support business decisions.

InterSystems Corporation, a provider of advanced database, integration and analytics technologies, announced it has become ISO 9001:2008 certified. ISO 9001:2008 is a quality management standard, and for InterSystems, the certification covers all processes related to the product and service creation associated with the InterSystems CACHÉ high-performance database and InterSystems Ensemble integration and development platform that are performed or managed from InterSystems' Cambridge-based headquarters.

Star Analytics, Inc., a provider of application process automation and integration software, has released the latest version of its data bridging technology, Star Integration Server, which is intended to make it easy to extract and combine data from Oracle systems with other business intelligence (BI) applications and data warehouses.

HiT Software, Inc. has announced a new release of its JDBC/DB2 type 4 SQL middleware, which conforms to the Java JDBC 4.1 specification. With this latest release, application developers can take advantage of added support for additional data types, improved security mechanisms and support for IBM DB2 on a wide range of systems and platforms.

HiT Software, Inc. has announced a new release of its JDBC/DB2 type 4 SQL middleware, which conforms to the Java JDBC 4.1 specification. With this latest release, application developers can take advantage of added support for additional data types, improved security mechanisms and support for IBM DB2 on a wide range of systems and platforms.

"Big data" and analytics have become the rage within the executive suite. The promise is immense - harness all the available information within the enterprise, regardless of data model or source, and mine it for insights that can't be seen any other way. In short, senior managers become more effective at business planning, spotting emerging trends and opportunities and anticipating crises because they have the means to see both the metaphorical trees and the forest at the same time. However, big data technologies don't come without a cost.

Let's tie together the last several columns on "2012 Might Really be The End of the World." In this series, I discussed several megatrends in the general IT industry that will have a tremendous impact on the database administration (DBA) profession. The megatrends include both software-related (virtualization and cheap cloud database services) and hardware-related (SSDs and massively multi-core CPUs). These technologies have the potential to obviate many of the core competencies of the DBA, with the first two eliminating or lessening the need for server and hardware configuration and provisioning, and the last two diminishing the need for IO tuning and query tuning, respectively. But those are trends that will take years to reach fruition. What about the near future?

Along with thousands of IT professionals, I was in the San Francisco Moscone Center main hall last October listening to Larry Ellison's 2011 Oracle Open world keynote. Larry can always be relied upon to give an entertaining presentation, a unique blend of both technology insights and amusingly disparaging remarks about competitors.

Retaining the particulars of change over time is a fairly intricate configuration. Audit log or shadow tables are sometimes employed, but on occasion there is a need for the "old" and "new" rows to exist in a single operation table for application use. Far too often, the implementation of temporal data structures is shoddy, loose, and imprecise; rather than the fairly complex dance move such temporal arrangements must perform in actuality. The sub-optimal result is much like one's performance of the Funky Chicken at a friend's wedding; the desired moves are mimicked, after a fashion, but it is unlikely to earn high marks on "So You Think You Can Dance." The usual temporal implementation simply slaps on start and stop dates, debates a little over default date values versus NULLs, then moves on to the next subject.

At the outset of each new year, I devote an edition of my column to review the significant data and database-related events of the previous year. Of course, to meet my deadlines, the column is written before the year is over (this column is being written in November 2011), so please excuse any significant news that may have happened late in December.

The latest version of expressor software's flagship data integration platform, expressor 3.5, features cloud integration with Melissa Data's Data Quality Tools and Salesforce.com to provide comprehensive BI reporting and CRM integration with on premises applications. The new Salesforce.com and Melissa Data capabilities ship with expressor 3.5 Desktop Edition and Standard Edition.

InterSystems Corporation, a provider of advanced database, integration and analytics technologies, announced it has become ISO 9001:2008 certified. ISO 9001:2008 is a quality management standard, and for InterSystems, the certification covers all processes related to the product and service creation associated with the InterSystems CACHÉ high-performance database and InterSystems Ensemble integration and development platform that are performed or managed from InterSystems' Cambridge-based headquarters.

ScaleBase, Inc. has announced the results of its database benchmark test. ScaleBase has achieved 180,000 Transactions per Minute - the highest result for a MySQL database - while running on an Amazon RDS environment. According to the company, the ScaleBase Load Balancer solution proved how well it can scale MySQL, by running a DBT-2 benchmark, which is similar to the standard TPC-C benchmark, on the Amazon EC2 platform with the Amazon RDS database.

Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3, a C, C++, and Fortran development platform for building fast, scalable enterprise applications for Oracle Solaris systems. According to Oracle, the new release accelerates performance of SPARC T4 and x86-based applications up to 300% by leveraging Oracle's advanced compiler technology.

BNP Paribas has implemented Oracle Exadata Database Machine to manage electronic trading floor data. BNP Paribas' data warehouse manages billions of messages in real-time processing a terabyte of raw data daily. A half-rack Oracle Exadata Database Machine has helped BNP Paribas better manage data growth and improve system performance.

Most Oracle performance analysis is now time-based. But it is "total time"-focused: Time to process a SQL statement, a batch process, or the CPU consumed plus Oracle wait time that occurred over an interval of time. This is a fantastic way to approach optimization because it is easy to monitor improvement and it is closer to what a user is experiencing. And, with just a couple twists, we can unite Operations Research (OR) queuing theory with the Oracle time-based approach, opening up an entirely new arena for performance analysis.

Sybase has launched the "Mobility Manifesto" site to support and encourage enterprise workers to have access to the devices and applications they want to use. The Mobility Manifesto allows enterprise workers to take a quiz to find out where their company ranks on mobility, share the results with their boss through an auto-fill letter that sets the tone for change in the workplace, and download an ibook including guidance and advice for both end user and IT.

SAP AG has announced that since introducing SAP HANA a year ago customer and partner demand for the technology has surged. According to Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP executive board, Technology & Innovation, leading independent software vendors are adopting the open SAP HANA platform for their existing products and also building completely new applications as well. The company also announced at the recent SAP Influencer Summit 2011 in Boston that SAP HANA is at the core of its platform roadmap, powering both renewed applications without disruption as well as new ones.