Versant Corporation has announced the availability of version 0.9 of its Versant Java Persistence API (JPA), allowing organizations to leverage the benefits of an enterprise-grade NoSQL solution via the Java industry-standard database programming interface. By using the Versant JPA to lower the barriers to NoSQL adoption, Versant says, enterprises can tackle volume, variety, and velocity challenges presented by big data management, and derive value from gaining more insights into information models faster and more easily. Versant JPA version 0.9 represents the first feature complete version of the API binding since the release of a Technology Preview in December 2011.

Storage memory platform vendor Fusion-io has announced that NoSQL database provider Couchbase is integrating to run Couchbase Server natively on ioMemory through Fusion-io's software development kit. Through the Fusion-io Key-Value API, Couchbase will integrate its database with persistent memory and offer the optimized code as open source to the community.

It's hard to overestimate Amazon's influence on cloud computing and on NoSQL databases. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first and still is the leading concrete example of an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud - a collection of cloud-based services such as compute (EC2), storage (S3) and other application building blocks.

The latest trends in big data analytics were presented by Objectivity, Inc. and Database Trends and Applications in a webcast that is now available for replay. Moderated by Tom Wilson, president of DBTA and Unisphere Media, and featuring Brian Clark, vice president of product management at Objectivity/DB and Leon Guzenda, founder of Objectivity/DB, the webcast covered how to maximize existing architectures by utilizing NoSQL technologies to improve functionality and provide real-time results. The V's of big data often focus on the volume, velocity, and variety of information, but organizations have to uncover the fourth V - the value of that big data - and that is where the power of the graph database comes in, the presenters emphasized.

It's hard to overestimate Amazon's influence on cloud computing and on NoSQL databases. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first and still is the leading concrete example of an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud - a collection of cloud-based services such as compute (EC2), storage (S3) and other application building blocks.

10gen, a sponsor of the open source non-relational database MongoDB, and Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, have announced new areas of collaboration and the joint development of best practices and blueprint reference designs for deploying MongoDB across Red Hat offerings, including the Red Hat Enterprise Linux enterprise operating system, Red Hat's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) OpenShift and Red Hat JBoss middleware solutions.

DataStax, which offers products and services based on the open source database Apache Cassandra, has announced DataStax Enterprise 2.0 (DSE 2.0), a big data solution designed to manage real-time, analytic, as well as enterprise search data, all in the same database cluster. With the updated platform, DataStax aims to deliver a comprehensive, integrated data management solution that manages real-time data with Cassandra, provides batch analytic capabilities with Apache Hadoop, and enables enterprise search on the same data with Apache Solr. "Enterprise search is a high-demand capability, and open source Apache Solr is the most popular open source search technology available," said Billy Bosworth, CEO, DataStax.

Pentaho Corporation, an open source business analytics company, has formed a strategic partnership with DataStax, a provider of big data solutions built upon the Apache Cassandra project, a high performance NoSQL database. The relationship will provide native integration between Pentaho Kettle and Apache Cassandra. This will merge the scalable, low-latency performance of Cassandra with Kettle's visual interface for high-performance ETL, as well as integrated reporting, visualization and interactive analysis capabilities. According to the companies, organizations seeking to leverage their big data have found it difficult to implement and employ analytics technologies. "One of the big challenges today is ease of use of these tools," says Ian Fyfe, Pentaho's chief technology evangelist. Often built on open source projects, it "takes a lot of deep skills to use these systems, and these are skills that are hard to find," he explains.

Pentaho Corporation, an open source business analytics company, has formed a strategic partnership with DataStax, a provider of big data solutions built upon the Apache Cassandra project, a high performance NoSQL database. The relationship will provide native integration between Pentaho Kettle and Apache Cassandra. This will merge the scalable, low-latency performance of Cassandra with Kettle's visual interface for high-performance ETL, as well as integrated reporting, visualization and interactive analysis capabilities. According to the companies, organizations seeking to leverage their big data have found it difficult to implement and employ analytics technologies. "One of the big challenges today is ease of use of these tools," says Ian Fyfe, Pentaho's chief technology evangelist. Often built on open source projects, it "takes a lot of deep skills to use these systems, and these are skills that are hard to find," he explains.

In years to come, we might remember October 2011 as the month the big database vendors gave in to the dark side and embraced Hadoop. In October, both Microsoft and Oracle announced product offerings which included and embraced Hadoop as the enabler of their "big data" solution. The last of the big three database vendors - IBM - embraced Hadoop back in 2010.

Looking back on 2011, I'm struck by two larger trends in the overall database marketplace. First, most energy and excitement (but not much forward motion) seems to be coming from the NoSQL space. And second, the major relational database platforms are generating what little energy they can outside of their core RDBMS technologies. If you kept up on one or more of the better general IT-industry news sources, you probably saw dozens of stories about various NoSQL vendors, spin-offs, and technologies in a single month, compared with perhaps one or two stories in the same period of time covering a traditional RDBMS platform such as Oracle, Microsoft's SQL Server, or MySQL.

Businesses are struggling to cope with and leverage an explosion of complex and connected data. This need is driving many companies to adopt scalable, high performance NoSQL databases - a new breed of database solutions - in order to expand and enhance their data management strategies. Traditional "relational" databases will not be able to keep pace with "big data" demands as they were not designed to manage the types of relationships that are so essential in today's applications.

Database Month, a new conference "for all things database," starts this week with a series of evening events in NYC. "We took the principle of a conference and spread it out over the entire second half of January to form what is essentially a database festival," Eric David Benari, chairman of Database Month, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

MapR Technologies, Inc., an Apache Hadoop distribution, introduced a new release that expands support for C/C++ API access and Windows and Mac clients, as well as being available as a virtual machine. MapR version 1.2 also includes the underpinnings to support MapReduce 2.0, which expands the types of applications that can take advantage of a Hadoop cluster.

Jaspersoft, a provider of business intelligence software, has released Jaspersoft 4.5. Designed with the non-technical user in mind, Jaspersoft 4.5 delivers drag-and-drop analytics and reporting on any flavor of big data including Apache Hadoop, NoSQL and analytic databases. Key new features include an enhanced analysis user interface, an improved in-memory engine with intelligent query push-down for greater performance, and native, low-latency access to non-relational data like Hadoop HBase and MongoDB. In addition, the new release provides enhanced Excel output and extended REST APIs.

As the leading provider of relational database software, it's hardly surprising that Oracle initially gave little or no credence to the NoSQL movement that emerged in 2009. Indeed, an Oracle white paper from May 2011 concluded with the recommendation to "Go for the tried and true path," and avoid NoSQL databases.

Versant Corporation, a provider of data management software, announced the re-launch of their database developer community, now live on their website. The community is an online portal to help developers apply Versant's NoSQL database technologies, and includes live forums and videos, webcasts, samples and documentation for managing complex object and big data solutions.

MapR Technologies, Inc., the provider of an advanced distribution for Apache Hadoop, has unveiled the MapR Training Academy, a free internet-based source for training videos and documentation to help the Hadoop user community accelerate the use of Hadoop for more business users. MapR Academy provides an introduction to Hadoop as a big data analytics platform and delves into the architecture, design and administration of Hadoop.

Quest Software has begun shipping a version of its Toad data management toolkit for cloud or NoSQL databases, available as a fully functional, commercial-grade product, for free. While the term 'cloud databases' is in the product name, the toolkit is intended for a variety of non-relational databases in both cloud and on-premises settings, John Whittaker, senior manager of product marketing for Quest, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "It's for big data, NoSQL, non-relational databases, which are commonly called 'cloud databases' in the industry," he explains. "We look at them as cloud databases because they were born out of the likes of Yahoo and Google." However, he adds, "this technology doesn't have to live in the cloud. It can be in a variety of places."

MapR Technologies, Inc., a provider of an advanced distribution for Apache Hadoop, and Lucid Imagination, a commercial company for Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technology, have announced a strategic partnership. The agreement will enable Lucid Imagination to integrate the dependability, ease of use and performance of the MapR Distribution with its LucidWorks search platform. Enterprise users will be able to take advantage of the platform's underlying Lucene/Solr search innovations to better utilize the benefits of big data analytics. "The power to leverage MapR's Hadoop distribution with Lucid Works offers organizations advantages including full data protection with unlimited scale," said Frank Calderon, president and COO of Lucid Imagination.

Neo Technology has launched Spring Data Neo4j 2.0, a scalable graph database, which it describes as the best NoSQL database for Spring. The announcement was made at the SpringOne 2GX 2011 Conference by Neo, a platinum sponsor of the event. This new release gives users the ability to develop applications that leverage complex, connected data, quickly on the Spring Framework. Neo also announced new customers, and named key executive additions, including Rod Johnson, Rickard Öberg, and Lars Nordwall to its team.

The Oracle NoSQL Database, which was announced at Oracle OpenWorld, is now available for download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Oracle also said that its new engineered system, the Oracle Big Data Appliance, an optimized platform for running the Oracle NoSQL Database and Oracle's other big data offerings that was also unveiled at OpenWorld, will ship in Q1 of the 2012 calendar year.

DataStax, a provider of solutions based on the open source Apache Cassandra database platform, announced it is shipping an enterprise database platform designed to enable the management of both real-time and analytic workloads from a single environment. The new platform, DataStax Enterprise, is designed to leverage the features of Cassandra to provide performance enhancements and cost savings over traditional database management solutions, the vendor claims.

The Oracle NoSQL Database, which was announced at Oracle OpenWorld, is now available for download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Oracle also said that its new engineered system, the Oracle Big Data Appliance, an optimized platform for running the Oracle NoSQL Database and Oracle's other big data offerings that was also unveiled at OpenWorld, will ship in Q1 of the 2012 calendar year.

One of the greatest achievements in artificial intelligence occurred earlier this year when IBM's Watson supercomputer defeated the two reigning human champions in the popular Jeopardy! TV show. Named after the IBM founder Thomas Watson and not - as you may have thought - Sherlock Holmes' famous assistant, Watson was the result of almost 5 years of intensive effort by IBM, and the intellectual successor to "Deep Blue," the first computer to beat a chess grand master.

As part of Database Trends and Applications' educational series of webcasts on NoSQL technologies, DBTA will present a new webcast introducing introduce Citrusleaf, a real-time NoSQL database built for high-velocity, mission-critical applications. The webcast will be held on Thursday, October 13, at 11 am PT/ 2 pm ET.

DataStax, a provider of solutions based on the open source Apache Cassandra database platform, announced it is shipping an enterprise database platform designed to enable the management of both real-time and analytic workloads from a single environment. The new platform, DataStax Enterprise, is designed to leverage the features of Cassandra to provide performance enhancements and cost savings over traditional database management solutions, the vendor claims.

Pervasive Software Inc., a provider of solutions for cloud-based and on-premises data analysis and integration, has announced that Pervasive DataRush for Hadoop v5.1 is a Cloudera Certified Technology. "With this certification, users have the assurance that our highly parallel big data engine has been tested and validated to work with Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop," says Mike Hoskins, Pervasive CTO and general manager, Pervasive Big Data Products and Solutions.

Big data, and particularly unstructured data, is becoming more broadly recognized as a competitive and decision-making tool, while also stretching IT's management, governance and storage capabilities. On September 8, at 2 pm ET/11 am PT, Database Trends and Applications and MarkLogic will offer a one-hour webcast on the nature and scope of the unstructured data challenge, and the key issues that managers are dealing with as they seek to leverage non-relational data in the form of business documents, social and web content, as well as information generated by smartphones and email systems.