At Oracle OpenWorld, F5 Networks, Inc., announced that its BIG-IP solutions have achieved Oracle Database and WebLogic Ready status through the Oracle PartnerNework (OPN), demonstrating that F5 has fully tested and supports BIG-IP version 10 products on Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle WebLogic 11g Release 1. The BIG-IP product family consists of physical and virtual solutions that provide integrated application delivery services, such as acceleration, security, access control, and high availability.

Allround Automations has released a free plug-in that directly connects its PL/SQL Developer IDE with Red Gate Software's Oracle database deployment tools. "Combining PL/SQL Developer and the Deployment Suite for Oracle from Red Gate gives any database developer an extremely powerful environment for development and deployment," Tom Harris, Red Gate's product manager for Oracle tools, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Ingres Corp. has been rebranded as Actian Corporation and unveiled a new strategy to enable companies to develop Action Apps which it describes as lightweight, consumer-style applications that automate business actions triggered by real-time changes in data. "The name change is symbolic of a completely new approach," Greg Wood, Actian CFO, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Ingres is becoming Actian to take action on big data, powered by VectorWise, the world's fastest data analytics engine."

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 during a presentation at the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters. Based on Oracle's new SPARC T4 servers, the engineered system exploits the same parallelism and data compression provided by Oracle's other engineered systems, the Exadata and Exalogic, said Ellison, and, importantly, provides a smooth upgrade path to the SPARC Solaris installed base.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 during a presentation at the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters. Based on Oracle's new SPARC T4 servers, the engineered system exploits the same parallelism and data compression provided by Oracle's other engineered systems, the Exadata and Exalogic, said Ellison, and, importantly, provides a smooth upgrade path to the SPARC Solaris installed base.

At Sybase TechWave, Sybase launched Sybase PowerBuilder 12.5, the second .NET release of its rapid application development tool. PowerBuilder 12.5 provides a fast and cost-effective solution for creating modern and visually appealing business applications on the Microsoft Windows 32 ((Win32) and .NET Frameworks.

At SAP TechEd 2011 in Las Vegas, SAP AG announced two new solutions built on SAP HANA, the company's in-memory computing platform. The two new solutions - SAP Smart Meter Analytics software powered by SAP HANA and SAP COPA Accelerator software - were developed by SAP product and design teams working in collaboration with customers. According to SAP the new applications will provide users with real-time insight into "big data," allowing them to leverage large amounts of information for analysis, planning, and forecasting and simulations in a more fluid, natural way versus traditional approaches.

Sybase, Inc., an SAP company, has announced the general availability of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 15.7. Sybase ASE 15.7 provides a cost-efficient relational database management system (RDBMS) for managing very large data sets for the most demanding applications. The new version of the enterprise data management solution saves disk space, increases performance and scalability on parallel hardware, and efficiently manages unstructured data.

Attunity Ltd., a provider of real-time data integration software, has introduced Attunity Replicate, high-performance data replication software. The new enterprise data replication solution emphasizes simplified user experience, quick time to value, and low cost of ownership, Itamar Ankorion, vice president of Business Development and Corporate Strategy, Attunity, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Attunity will present Attunity Replicate at Oracle OpenWorld, October 3-5, at booth #3728.

Quest Software's Toad product suite provides cross-platform database management tools and also offers extensions for application development tools such as Eclipse and Visual Studio. Demand for DBMS products that cover a range of platforms is increasing as customers seek comprehensive tools that address their complex environments, says Quest. The company recently launched its latest Toad product, the Toad for Sybase Suite, providing support for ASE, IQ and SQL Anywhere, and has also just announced updates to its flagship Toad offering, Toad for Oracle. "We are building more and more tools to make workflow easier and to bring all the productivity, efficiency, and optimization that we have always had in our Oracle solutions to new database platforms and new user personas," John Whittaker, senior manager of Product Marketing for Quest Toad, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Oracle has announced the Oracle Database Appliance - targeted at small and midsize enterprises and departments that want higher availability for their application databases. Like Exadata, it is an engineered system that combines hardware and software.

Quest Software has announced the availability of a new release of Toad for Oracle, the flagship product in the Toad portfolio. The new release contains a number of notable new capabilities, including the new Code Analysis feature which provides a more flexible and intuitive way to perform code reviews and analysis.

Allround Automations has released a free plug-in that directly connects its PL/SQL Developer IDE with Red Gate Software's Oracle database deployment tools. "Combining PL/SQL Developer and the Deployment Suite for Oracle from Red Gate gives any database developer an extremely powerful environment for development and deployment," Tom Harris, Red Gate's product manager for Oracle tools, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

At SAP TechEd 2011 in Las Vegas, SAP AG announced two new solutions built on SAP HANA, the company's in-memory computing platform. The two new solutions - SAP Smart Meter Analytics software powered by SAP HANA and SAP COPA Accelerator software - were developed by SAP product and design teams working in collaboration with customers. According to SAP the new applications will provide users with real-time insight into "big data," allowing them to leverage large amounts of information for analysis, planning, and forecasting and simulations in a more fluid, natural way versus traditional approaches.

As the world's most popular open source database, MySQL's speed, reliability, and ease of use have made user-generated content and social media available to the masses. In the 18 months since the Oracle acquisition of MySQL, Oracle continues to develop MySQL internally and integrate community patches. Under Oracle's stewardship, MySQL released its first new major version in 2 years.

Cost containment is an important IT department goal in this day and age of financial austerity. Every decision regarding your computing environment must be weighed not only against the value it can deliver to your organization but also upon its cost to procure, implement, and maintain. If a positive return on investment cannot be rapidly delivered, then the software (or hardware) won't be adopted.

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.

As data grows, the reflex reaction within many organizations is to buy and install more disk storage. Smart approaches are on the horizon but still only prevalent among a minority of companies. How is it data has grown so far so fast? Technology growth along the lines of Moore's Law (doubling every 18 months) has made petabyte-capable hardware and software a reality. And data growth itself appears to be keeping pace with the hardware and systems. In fact, a petabyte's worth of data is almost commonplace, as shown in a new survey conducted by Unisphere Research among members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). In "The Petabyte Challenge: 2011 IOUG Database Growth Survey," close to 1 out of 10 respondents report that the total amount of online (disk-resident) data they manage today-taking into account all clones, snapshots, replicas and backups-now tops a petabyte.

VoltDB, Inc. today announced the general availability of VoltDB open source relational database management system (RDBMS) version 2.0. VoltDB is a distributed, in-memory database designed for applications that are pushed beyond their limits by high-volume data sources. The new release adds new features for developer productivity, database durability and recovery, including performance and interoperability improvements.

Sybase, Inc., an SAP company, has announced the general availability of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 15.7. Sybase ASE 15.7 provides a cost-efficient relational database management system (RDBMS) for managing very large data sets for the most demanding applications. The new version of the enterprise data management solution saves disk space, increases performance and scalability on parallel hardware, and efficiently manages unstructured data.

InterSystems Corporation, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with offices in 23 countries, has announced the strategic acquisition of Siemens Health Services (SHS) France from its Siemens parent company. SHS, a provider of healthcare solutions to hospitals in France, will now operate as InterSystems SAS. This acquisition moves InterSystems into a strong position in France, which is one of the world's top five healthcare IT markets by revenue, and marks the entry of InterSystems TrakCare advanced clinical applications into this market.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has announced the release of PostgreSQL 9.1. This latest version of the open source database offers important new features such as synchronous replication, K-Nearest Neighbor indexing, and foreign data wrappers.

The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) has announced its program of hosted meetings and educational sessions at the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld 2011 conference Oct. 2-6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Throughout the week of the event, OAUG members will facilitate more than 30 educational sessions addressing the training and professional development needs of Oracle Applications users.

For many organizations, data is not only crossing into the hundreds of terabytes, but into the near-petabyte (PB) and multi-petabyte range. In a new survey sponsored by Oracle and conducted by Unisphere Research among members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), "The Petabyte Challenge: 2011 IOUG Database Growth Survey," close to one out of 10 respondents report that the total amount of online (disk-resident) data they manage today - taking into account all clones, snapshots, replicas and backups - tops a petabyte.

At an event for customers, partners and industry experts in Redwood Shores that was also presented live online, Oracle announced Oracle VM 3.0, the latest release of its server virtualization and management solution. According to the company, Oracle VM 3.0 is suitable for all data center workloads and features new policy-based management capabilities, advanced storage management via the Oracle VM Storage Connect plug-in API; centralized network configuration management, improved ease-of-use and Open Virtualization Format (OVF) support.

Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Application Express Release 4.1, which enhances existing functionality and adds data upload capabilities. Oracle Application Express is a "no-cost" option included with all editions and releases of Oracle Database 11g that allows developers, using only a web browser, to build and deploy professional and scalable applications for Oracle databases.

Gluster, a provider of open source storage solutions, has just released a version of its storage system that includes support for Apache Hadoop. GlusterFS 3.3 beta 2 employs standard file system APIs available in Hadoop to provide a new storage option for Hadoop deployments.

Ingres, an open source database provider, has begun shipping VectorWise for Windows, intended to address analytics requirements within Microsoft technology shops. This latest release of VectorWise provides analytics and interactive reporting against big data sets for companies with Windows-based architectures.

For many organizations, data is not only crossing into the hundreds of terabytes, but into the near-petabyte (PB) and multi-petabyte range. In a new survey sponsored by Oracle and conducted by Unisphere Research among members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), "The Petabyte Challenge: 2011 IOUG Database Growth Survey," close to one out of 10 respondents report that the total amount of online (disk-resident) data they manage today - taking into account all clones, snapshots, replicas and backups - tops a petabyte.