Business Intelligence and Analytics Articles
As DBAs, we can get mired in the depths of performance tuning parameters and scripts, sometimes getting lost in all the details. It is a good idea to always have a set of goals and philosophies that you can lean on to keep you focused and working on the appropriate things. That is what I want to talk about in this month's DBA Corner column. Some high-level rules of thumb for achieving your DBMS-related performance goals and maintaining your sanity.
Posted May 17, 2017
VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility and Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork, and Oracle have formed a new relationship to simplify management and enable advanced security features for Oracle's suite of mobile business applications and Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (OMCS) for mobile devices.
Posted May 17, 2017
In October of 2008, Congress enacted the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, more commonly known as the bailout of the financial system. The understanding was that catastrophic financial consequences would be the result of the failure of these entities and that those aggregate failures could devastate the U.S. The recent major outages in the public clouds services inevitably lead to the same issue being consider with regard to this new industry.
Posted May 15, 2017
With the furor over fake news, where the truth is massaged for commercial or political gain, the focus has gone off fake data—which can have a lot more perilous consequences.
Posted May 15, 2017
When people talk about the next generation of applications or infrastructure, what is often echoed throughout the industry is the cloud. On the application side, the concept of "serverless" is becoming less of a pipe dream and more of a reality. The infrastructure side has already proven that it is possible to deliver the ability to pay for compute on an hourly or more granular basis.
Posted May 15, 2017
You will often hear experienced practitioners and consultants suggest that there is both an art and a science to effective data governance. The art is in the details of fine-tuning a data governance program to fit your culture and address specific business needs. But the fundamental principles of data governance are best understood and executed through science.
Posted May 15, 2017
The tide is changing for analytics architectures. Traditional approaches, from the data warehouse to the data lake, implicitly assume that all relevant data can be stored in a single, centralized repository. But this approach is slow and expensive, and sometimes not even feasible, because some data sources are too big to be replicated, and data is often too distributed to make a "full centralization" strategy successful.
Posted May 15, 2017
Over the next 6 years, the Internet of Things (IoT) market is expected to reach $883.55 billion, as connected devices continue to pour into just about every aspect of our lives. For enterprises, the IoT is helping to transform products into connected services, capable of creating recurring revenue streams, reducing costs, and enhancing customers' experiences.
Posted May 15, 2017
Data—now universally understood to be the lifeblood of businesses—is at risk like never before in the form of both malicious attacks and innocent indiscretions. Recently, Steve Grobman, CTO for McAfee, discussed the range of threats to data security and what companies must do to defend themselves.
Posted May 15, 2017
Organizations are embracing data visualization as more than a tool to "see" trends and patterns in data but as a pathway to a dynamic culture of visual data discovery. As with any type of cultural shift, there are going to be a few bumps along the road as innovative ways to transform data into actionable insights through the power of data visualization are sought.However, with a few considerations kept top-of-mind in the early stages of data visualization adoption, common problems can be avoided.
Posted May 15, 2017
Big data and analytics are all around these days. Most companies already have their first analytical models in production and are thinking about further boosting their performance. However, far too often, these companies focus on the analytical techniques rather than on the key ingredient: data. The best way to boost the performance and ROI of an analytical model is by investing in new sources of data which can help to further unravel complex customer behavior and improve key analytical insights.
Posted May 15, 2017
Today's headlines are filled with news about artificial intelligence (AI), proclaiming variously that robots will take our jobs, cure cancer, or change industries in ways unseen since the industrial revolution. One thing is clear to those of us watching closely, however: It's not all hype. In 2016 alone, the quantity of AI startup acquisitions was remarkable, but most of these massive investments were made by an elite corps of companies, such as Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook and a few others.
Posted May 15, 2017
What are the enabling technologies that make enterprise architecture what it is today? There are a range of new-generation technologies and approaches shaping today's data environments. The key is putting them all together to help enterprise architecture fit into the enterprise's vision of itself as a data-driven organization. Tools and technologies emerging within today's data-driven enterprise include cloud, data lakes, real-time analytics, microservices, containers, Spark, Hadoop, and open source trends.
Posted May 15, 2017
Continuing its Cloud Platform expansion, Oracle is adding enhancements to make it easier for organizations to move enterprise database applications to the cloud.
Posted May 11, 2017
Neo Technology, creator of Neo4j, a graph database solution, is releasing an update to Neo4j that introduces enterprise scaling, governance and security capabilities, and improves native graph performance. The update, Neo4j 3.2, adds multi-data center capabilities to enable customers to build the next generation of global internet scale applications.
Posted May 11, 2017
TimeXtender is now offering its Discovery Hub in three deployment models: in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid model.
Posted May 11, 2017
GridGain Systems, a provider of enterprise-grade in-memory computing platform solutions based on Apache Ignite, has announced the availability of GridGain Professional Edition 2.0, a fully supported version of Apache Ignite 2.0.
Posted May 11, 2017
Boxever, which provides an artificial intelligence-based personalization platform for B2C companies, has announced its partnership with the Oracle Marketing AppCloud, and the availability of Boxover's Customer Intelligence Cloud on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. Boxover, which is also a Silver level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork, offers AI and data analytics capabilities to help marketers improve personalization.
Posted May 10, 2017
Syncsort is integrating its Big Iron to Big Data powerhouse Ironstream with Compuware Corporation's Application Audit software, improving an organization's ability to detect threats against critical mainframe data, correlate them with related information, and events to satisfy compliance requirements.
Posted May 10, 2017
Dell EMC is announcing new data backup and protection solutions to enable customers to ensure data is secure, backed up and protected against disasters and outages.
Posted May 09, 2017
IBM is opening four new IBM Cloud data centers across the United States to support growing enterprise demand for cloud infrastructure that can provide access to services such as IoT, blockchain, quantum computing and cognitive. The new cloud centers are based in Dallas, Texas and Washington, D.C.
Posted May 08, 2017
Blue Medora, a provider of enterprise cloud and datacenter management solutions, is releasing its True Visibility Suite will as a third-party product available as part of the VMware vCloud Air Network Program.
Posted May 08, 2017
Confluent, a provider of a streaming platform based on Apache Kafka, is rolling out Confluent Cloud, a fully managed streaming data service aimed at helping developers to focus on building streaming applications with Apache Kafka, rather than Kafka operations. Currently available via an early access program, the Confluent Cloud service will initially be available in Amazon Web Services, with support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to be added in the future.
Posted May 08, 2017
Fuzzy Logix, which offers in-database analytics, and Kinetica, a provider of GPU-accelerated database, have announced a partnership to offer a joint solution. Since 2012, Fuzzy Logix has had GPU-accelerated analytics, but no GPU-accelerated database to take advantage of their advancements at scale, said Amit Vij, CEO and co-founder of Kinetica. With this collaboration, he noted, Fuzzy Logix has chosen the Kinetica GPU database as the home for its library of GPU-accelerated analytics.
Posted May 08, 2017
OpenText, a provider of enterprise information management software, has introduced the second enhancement pack for OpenText Release 16, the company's digital information platform that helps customers to digitize business processes and manage information flows across the digital enterprise. Supporting the flow of information inside and outside of the enterprise, the extended ECM platform offers stronger integrations within the OpenText Platform as well as with leading applications such as Archiving for Oracle EBS, and SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C), SuccessFactors, and Hybris Marketing.
Posted May 08, 2017
Open source database provider MariaDB has announced that the European Investment Bank (EIB) is making a 25 million euro investment in the company to support its next stage of growth and database innovation. MariaDB says that the EIB operation is guaranteed under the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), a key element of the European Commission's Investment Plan for Europe, aiming at reviving investment in strategic projects around Europe.
Posted May 08, 2017
Choices are pervasive when designing a database. The data modeler must progress through a series of issues: What ideas are important? Which objects stand out? Which concepts can take a back seat? Adding to all those decisions comes understanding the target structures one is shooting at. A normalized design may lean one way, while a dimensional design may lean another.
Posted May 05, 2017
Not only has the Microsoft SQL Server engineering team added more and stronger leadership, outstanding individual engineers and staff members, but it is also radically moving its entire development process into a "cloud-first" ethos. Now, I'd like to show one of the most salient results of this new development process-accelerated product releases. It was only a few years ago (and is still the case for other data management platforms) that a major new release takes at least 2, but more likely 3 years. With the "production-ready" release of SQL Server 2017 Community Technology Preview 2.0, we are only 1 year from the last production release.
Posted May 05, 2017
MongoDB faced its worst-ever public relations challenge earlier this year when a spate of ransomware attacks plagued tens of thousands of Mongo instances. It's important to realize that we are not talking about some sort of obscure vulnerability here - these MongoDB databases were configured with NO passwords at all, and were easily found listening on the default port (27017) on publicly-accessible servers.
Posted May 05, 2017
Splunk is unveiling a new edition of Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud, making it easier than ever for a wide range of users to leverage datasets, build dashboards, get answers and share insights. Indexer and search head clustering enhancements make the platform easier to manage at scale.
Posted May 05, 2017
Dell EMC has announced a new platform for implementing and sustaining a hybrid cloud based on Microsoft Azure Stack. The new Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack is aimed at helping organizations standardize on the Microsoft Azure ecosystem and provides automated IT service delivery for traditional and cloud-native applications.
Posted May 04, 2017
With the addition of modern infrastructure as a service (IaaS) architecture and new IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) cloud services, Oracle is making enhancements to the Oracle Cloud EU Region in Germany.
Posted May 04, 2017
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Software is releasing the GDPR Starter Kit, helping organizations take the first step to prepare for the European Union's upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards. This bundled set of software solutions assists organizations to automatically identify, classify, and take action to secure information that falls under this regulation.
Posted May 03, 2017
Oracle has introduced new artificial intelligence-based customer experience applications to support B2B and B2C interactions. Helping organizations to avoid the need for additional processes and integrations, the applications are intended to allow organizations achieve immediate value and embrace more efficient approaches, according to Jack Berkowitz, vice president, Products & Data Science, Oracle Adaptive Intelligence.
Posted May 03, 2017
Megaport has announced a cloud connectivity collaboration with Oracle. Through this initiative, Megaport and Oracle aim to provide enterprises with an approach for creating dedicated and private connectivity to Oracle Cloud services that can scale with changing business needs.
Posted May 03, 2017
One of the significant changes enterprises should expect to gain speed this year is the expanding role of business users in IT. Fences around the IT landscape are slowly coming down and business users are playing an active part in the digital transformation. It's uncharted territory, driving an increased demand for information governance initiatives to help companies use data to navigate the transformation. Here are trends to watch as data and business users' roles evolve within IT and across the enterprise.
Posted May 03, 2017
Emerging from stealth mode this week, Aparna Systems announced the Orca µCloud and Orca µServer—providing an open software Cloud-in-a-Box solution. Going beyond "hyperconvergence," Aparna says it provides "ultra-convergence" with the combination of compute, storage and networking resources in a compact, energy-efficient system. "Hyper-convergence is compute and storage with a hypervisor on it. In our case it is that plus networking. We provide the networking software and networking infrastructure," said Sam Mathan, CEO and co-founder of Aparna.
Posted May 02, 2017
EnterpriseDB has collaborated with Red Hat to accelerate access to the EDB Postgres Platform on Red Hat OpenShift Container Application Platform.
Posted May 02, 2017
Sisense is launching "Sisense Startup," a new program to offer qualifying early-stage startups complimentary licensing of Sisense's analytics technology to embed in their application or solution.
Posted May 02, 2017
Datos IO has announced a new version of its cloud-scale data management platform, RecoverX 2.0, to help organizations be more agile, enhance productivity, and drive operational efficiency as they deploy their next-generation customer-centric applications in the cloud and scale their traditional applications across hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud infrastructures.
Posted May 02, 2017
Cloudera, which last week began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "CLDR," has announced the general availability of the Cloudera Data Science Workbench, a self-service tool for data scientists. The workbench, which was announced in beta at Strata+Hadoop World San Jose 2017, enables fast, easy and secure self-service data science for the enterprise.
Posted May 02, 2017
Cloudera, a provider of a platform for machine learning and advanced analytics built on open source technologies including Hadoop, launched an IPO and is beginning public trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "CLDR."
Posted April 28, 2017
Blue Medora, a provider of IT operational analytics (ITOA) for enterprise cloud, database and infrastructure management, is expanding its SelectStar SaaS database performance solution to support Microsoft Azure and Azure SQL databases. SelectStar for Azure provides metric-based and deep-dive monitoring for Azure native database workloads, enabling users to see query-level metrics on their Azure SQL databases.
Posted April 27, 2017
Unstructured data and complex information that doesn't fit neatly into tiny boxes can be difficult to work with in a traditional relational database. That's why organizations in industries from automotive design to toys to logistics rely on MultiValue databases to "bring order to chaos" by allowing just about any type of information to be transformed into useful data.
Posted April 26, 2017
SAP is introducing SAP Fieldglass Live Insights, a new machine learning-powered, data-driven insights service that makes it possible for executives to benchmark, plan, predict and simulate external talent scenarios. The new SAP Fieldglass service is the result of partnering with SAP Data Network to create this capability that is powered by SAP HANA.
Posted April 26, 2017
Magic Software Enterprises Ltd., a global provider of software platforms for enterprise mobility, cloud applications, and business integration, is extending its Magic xpi 4.6 release to enable users access to a broader range of platforms including SAP. With over 100 pre-built connectors to leading applications and technologies, Magic xpi Integration Platform supports organizations' on-premise, cloud, and hybrid integration needs.
Posted April 26, 2017
NextLabs, Inc., an SAP partner and provider of data-centric security software, released a new product in the Data Centric Security suite for SAP software, increasing access control and data security requirements. Entitlement Manager for S/4 HANA provides enhanced access control across all Fiori applications.
Posted April 26, 2017
SAP is launching the SAP.iO Fund, seeded with an initial investment of $35 million, to encourage early-stage investments in software startups that will expand the SAP ecosystem. The fund is just one component of the SAP.iO open innovation model, which enables innovators both inside and outside SAP to use the power of SAP data, application programming interfaces (APIs), and platform technologies to unlock new value for customers.
Posted April 26, 2017