DBTA Readers’ Choice Awards Winners (2022)

Accelerated digital transformation has been felt in a variety of ways across all industry sectors for the past 2 years. Digital infrastructure resiliency and agility are crucial in periods of uncertainty and disruption, which many organizations are experiencing with the confluence of disrupted supply chains, rising inflation, geopolitical instability, energy price spikes, the ongoing global pandemic, and climate change. Read More

Awesome Companies in AI 2022

AI is delivering new benefits and efficiencies to organizations through greater automation capabilities, ease of use, and accessibility—across a variety of use cases. Spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and a host of other compounding factors such as climate change and sustainability, supply chain delays, the Great Resignation, and the war in Ukraine, companies are scrambling to take advantage of what AI has to offer during this upheaval. Read More

Sponsored Content: Amazon Aurora Serverless: Changing the DBaaS Landscape

Serverless databases are here, and there is no going back. We first saw the emergence of serverless technology in the application layer, with fixed capacity for relational databases. Now, with serverless databases, both the application and database layers can scale automatically with no performance bottleneck. Data and modern databases are critical to an organization's data strategy and digital transformation initiatives. With serverless databases, IT teams have the ability to drive more of these initiatives. Read More

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Columnists

Database Elaborations

Todd Schraml

Modeling Data is Important Data modeling has always been a task that seems positioned in the middle of a white-water rapids with a paddle but no canoe. On one side of the data modeling rapids are the raging agilists who are demanding working software and decrying virtually all documentation. To this agilists' group, data modeling is often seen as too simple to matter. But at the same time, their implementations will miss standardization in naming or data model patterns. And results may be so far off course that major rework is unavoidable. Sadly, far too many agile practices have been set up to place things under the technical debt umbrella, when in reality those practices never allow the re-factoring closet door to be opened. Poor data models are "overcome" by creating ever more complex logic around the data in order to get to a more proper result, as developers learn what really needs to be accomplished along the way, maybe. The results may work but can be a nightmare to maintain.

DBA Corner

Craig S. Mullins

Proper Data Types Pave the Road to Data Quality Assuring data quality should be one of the most important goals for IT professionals. This is truer today than it has ever been as organizations rely on data to power their AI and machine learning algorithms. Accurate, quality data is required if you want to make accurate decisions. And that is true, whether the data is being analyzed by a human or a computer algorithm.

SQL Server Drill Down

Kevin Kline

New Troubleshooting Capabilities in SQL Server and Azure SQL Microsoft has recently released a powerful new DMV specifically to help with memory issues, sys.dm_os_out_of_memory_events. It is currently available in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instances. This DMV consolidates and simplifies telemetry from SQL Server ring buffers, applies heuristics, and provides a result set. The DMV stores a record for each out-of-memory (OOM) event that occurs within the database, providing details about the OOM root cause, the memory consumption of database engine components at that point in time, potential sources of memory leaks, and more.

Emerging Technologies

Guy Harrison

SQL Survives and Thrives in the Post-NoSQL Era The SQL language served as a universal language for database manipulation from the mid-1980s until NoSQL databases started gaining strength about 12 years ago. However, after a short period in the wilderness, SQL is back and possibly more vital than ever.

Next-Gen Data Management

The Cost-Benefit Analysis of Database Backup Strategies Data plays a vital role in any successful business. Protecting this data is mission-critical, and it falls to database administrators (DBAs) to organize, maintain, and secure it. The most effective way for DBAs to protect data is through database backups, a process designed to copy the data and schema from an existing database and save it elsewhere for future retrieval. Like any process in IT, however, there are a few factors to consider when devising a database backup strategy to ensure it meets your business needs.