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January 2013 - UPDATE

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Trends and Applications

The explosion of big data has presented many challenges for today's database administrators (DBAs), who are responsible for managing far more data than ever before. And with more programs being developed and tested, more tools are needed to help optimize data and efficiency efforts. Using techniques such as DB2's Multi-Row Fetch (MRF), DBAs are able to cut down on CPU time - and improve application efficiency. MRF was introduced in DB2 version 8 in 2004. Stated simply, it is the ability for DB2 to send multiple rows back to a requesting program at once, rather than one row at a time.

EMC Greenplum has qualified Attunity RepliWeb for Enterprise File Replication (EFR) and Attunity Managed File Transfer (MFT) with EMC Greenplum Hadoop (HD). Attunity RepliWeb for EFR and Attunity MFT are high-performance, easy-to-use solutions for automating, managing and accelerating the process of making data available for big data analytics with Hadoop. According to Attunity, the products, launched earlier this year, are the first and only solutions currently qualified by EMC for Greenplum HD. "Greenplum has come into the marketplace by storm and has had a strong vision of being data-independent or data-agnostic. They want to make sure that their analytic platform can handle both structured and unstructured data and this aligns very well with Attunity's mission statement of any data, any time, anywhere," Matt Benati, vice president of Global Marketing at Attunity, tells DBTA.

Databases are hampered by a reliance on disk-based storage, a technology that has been in place for more than two decades. Even with the addition of memory caches and solid state drives, the model of relying on repeated access to the permanent information storage devices is still a bottleneck in capitalizing on today's "big data," according to a new survey of 323 data managers and professionals who are part of the IOUG. Nearly 75% of respondents believe that in-memory technology is important to enabling their organization to remain competitive in the future. Yet, almost as many also indicate they lack the in-memory skills to deliver even current business requirements. The research results are detailed in a new report, titled "Accelerating Enterprise Insights: 2013 IOUG In-Memory Strategies Survey."

Enterprise NoSQL database provider MarkLogic Corporation has partnered with business intelligence vendor Tableau Software to offer analytics and visualization over unstructured big data. The partnership allows business users to leverage Tableau's business intelligence and reporting solutions to access disparate data sets of structured and unstructured data house in a MarkLogic NoSQL database. "Not only can you build rich, sophisticated applications, but you can also make use of that data where it is, and have business users connect to that data, visualize it, and do analytics over it, without involving the development center," Stephen Buxton, MarkLogic's director of product management, tells DBTA.

Oracle has merged the core capabilities of the Oracle Audit Vault and Oracle Database Firewall products, creating the new Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall product which expands protection beyond Oracle and third-party databases with support for auditing the operating system, directories and custom sources. "It is really one single, streamlined solution to do both security and compliance for Oracle and non-Oracle databases, and extending beyond databases, to operating systems, file systems, and directories - essentially the structure surrounding your database," notes Vipin Samar, vice president, Database Security, Oracle. "Data governance is increasingly important in many organizations and, as we know from the IOUG survey that we did earlier this year, we have very few organizations that are monitoring sensitive data access," adds Roxana Bradescu, director of product marketing, Data Security, Oracle.

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