DBTA E-EDITION
April 2009
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Trends and Applications
Every data integration initiative—whether it supports better decision making, a merger/acquisition, regulatory compliance, or other business need—requires a set of processes to be completed before the data can be made available to business users. Though this set of processes is fairly well understood by industry practitioners, there are still many areas left unaddressed and, therefore, the process is time-consuming, inefficient, unpredictable, and costly.
Ed Boyajian joined EnterpriseDB, the open source database company whose products and services are based on PostgreSQL, in June, 2008, as president and CEO. Before that, he spent six years in sales leadership roles at Red Hat, including vice president and general manager for North American sales, and vice president, worldwide OEM and North American channels. Recently Boyajian chatted with DBTA about the looming challenges and opportunities for open source in general as well as for EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus product family.
Those of us in the data security industry, practitioners and vendors alike, have been conditioned to think of data protection in terms that are analogous to physical security. Blocking devices and sensors are akin to locks and security systems. This is why for years we have been investing in those technologies that will block out unauthorized connections all the while making information more and more accessible. There is, however, a new world order at hand. Data creation rates now far outpace the ability of IT managers to write security rules, and the number of data breaches and threats that originate from network insiders have proven much more frequent and insidious than even our most dire predictions of five years ago.
IT managers from organizations of all sizes know the importance of maintaining access to critical applications and data. From irritating "system unavailable" messages to the most unfortunate natural and manmade disasters where entire systems may be lost, the challenge is particularly acute for database-driven, transactional applications and data—the lifeblood of the business. The dynamic, transactional data and applications that comprise, process, manage and leverage critical customer accounts and history, sales, marketing, engineering and operational components keep the organization thriving.
Columns - Applications Insight
The business intelligence (BI) market is big: at least $10 billion in 2008 and much more if you include data warehousing projects. The tough economic environment may slow the growth of the BI market, but cost constraints, compliance and similar measures demanded by the current economy require accurate and timely business data, so BI is expected to remain a vigorous market segment regardless of the macro-economic situation.
Columns - Database Elaborations
In a relational database approach, regardless of whether one is considering persisted data or transitory query results, almost everything is viewed as a logical table. Associations between these envisioned tables are based on data values, versus the alternative to the pre-relational idea of linking multiple data structures via "hidden" pointers maintained by the system. Relationships among objects are ultimately derived from the semantics of a situation.
Columns - DBA Corner
Although the most important aspect of DBA tool selection is functionality and the way it satisfies your needs, the stability of the vendor that provides the product is also important
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
The idea of "SQL Server in the cloud" is all the rage as I write this article. Many SQL Server experts already predict the demise of the IT data center and a complete upending of the current state of our industry, in which large enterprises can spend millions of dollars on SQL Server licenses, hardware and staff. I have to admit, when I first heard about this idea, I was ecstatic. What could be better for an enterprise than to have all the goodness of a SQL Server database with none of the hardware or staffing issues? However, on deeper examination, there is much about which to be cautious.
MV Community
APT Solutions is a U.K.-based provider of web-enabled membership management software and associated specialist membership administration services to the not-for-profit sector. Its clients include member-based organizations such as trade unions, institutions, clubs, societies, charities and health plan providers. The company's Stratum Membership Management software solution helps organizations gain control over their member information and leverage the information to save money, increase efficiencies, boost member communications, retention, loyalty and donations and improve staff productivity.
Ladybridge Systems, a privately owned U.K,-based company, has announced that BookMasters, one of the largest distributors of books in the U.S., has completed migration of their 105-user business system to QM. Running on a quad core Xeon system with five 32Gb Managed Flash Technology drives (Easy Computing Company) the migration has significantly reduced costs and is delivering high performance, according to the companies. Application level read rates averaging in excess of 95,000 records per second have been recorded. Some reports that previously took several hours to complete now run in just a few minutes.
jBASE International, a leading supplier of database management software, has unveiled features of the upcoming version of its multidimensional database, jBASE Release 5.
The OpenInsight 8.0.8 upgrade is now available for download from The Works download section of Revelation's website.