DBTA E-EDITION
May 2013
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Trends and Applications
What Does it Mean to be a "Real-Time Enterprise"?
NoSQL databases are becoming increasingly popular for analyzing big data. There are very few NoSQL solutions, however, that provide the combination of scalability, reliability and data consistency required in a mission-critical application. As the open source implementation of Google's BigTable architecture, HBase is a NoSQL database that integrates directly with Hadoop and meets these requirements for a mission-critical database.
Columns - Applications Insight
Computer games have been front-runners in many important developments in the IT industry, including digital distribution, cloud storage, user driven design, and crowd sourcing. So it's not surprising that game developers are in a leading position when it comes to big data analytics and machine learning. Online games have the ability to monitor all aspects of player behavior, so, just as Google is able to refine your search results by analyzing your previous searches and comparing them to the billions of searches done every day, online game companies are able to modify game behavior to ensure a more optimal game experience by observing what works - and what doesn't - in the gamer's world.
Columns - Database Elaborations
It seems that juggling is the most useful of all skills when embarking on a data warehousing project. During the discovery and analysis phase, the workload grows insanely large, like some mutant science fiction monster. Pressures to deliver can encourage rampant corner-cutting to move quickly, while the need to provide value urges caution in order not to throw out the proverbial baby with the bath water as the project speeds along. Change data capture is one area that is a glaring example of the necessary juggling and balancing.
Columns - DBA Corner
Data is not sedentary. Once data has been created, organizations tend to move it around to support many different purposes—different applications, different geographies, different users, different computing environments, and different DBMSs. Data is copied and transformed and cleansed and duplicated and stored many times throughout the organization. Different copies of the same data are used to support transaction processing and analysis; test, quality assurance, and operational systems; day-to-day operations and reporting; data warehouses, data marts, and data mining; and distributed databases. Controlling this vast sea of data falls on the DBA who uses many techniques and technologies to facilitate data movement and distribution.
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
When you decide to undertake your own benchmarking project, it's a strongly recommended best practice to write up a benchmarking plan. A benchmark must produce results that are both reliable and repeatable so that we can foster conclusions that are predictable and actionable. Keeping the "reliable and repeatable" mantra in mind necessitates a few extra steps.
MV Community
Oklahoma City Housing Authority (OCHA) has selected Informer Dashboards from Entrinsik to help it quickly and easily create and share data visualizations. Informer Dashboards answers a pressing need for OCHA. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has various reporting guidelines for housing authorities that require a significant amount of data to ensure compliance. HUD is beginning to require dashboards as a way of presenting this data and OCHA had no easy way of quickly and easily developing the necessary visualizations.
Pick Cloud, Inc. has signed a reseller agreement with AccuSoft Enterprises to sell its line of AccuTerm terminal emulation products. According to Pick Cloud, the reseller agreement enables Pick Cloud to offer and leverage AccuSoft's GUI development tools as well as their connectivity and terminal emulation products.
Revelation Software recently held its user conference in Nashville, Tenn. "At the conference, we really emphasize training," Robert Catalano, director of sales at Revelation, tells DBTA. At this year's event, particular emphasis was placed on O4W training, he notes. In addition, plans are already underway for the next conference which will take place after the 10.0 release of the company's flagship product, OpenInsight.
Rocket U2 is now providing a single ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) driver for UniData and UniVerse that supports both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. The driver provides a standard interface for user applications, third-party reporting and BI tools to connect with data sources. In addition, the U2 Metadata Manager (U2 MDM) is now also available for UniVerse 11.1.11 and above.