Database Management Articles
Cloud database startup NuoDB, Inc. has announced the availability of their Release Candidate 1 (RC1) for immediate download, marking the end of the company's year-long private beta trial. SQL-compliant, NuoDB guarantees ACID transactions and scales elastically in the cloud or on premises. Offering high performance and efficient resource utilization, the solution uses an asynchronous, peer-to-peer model. NuoDB will be offered in two editions: Community and Pro. The Community Edition is a free-forever version for smaller-scale applications, while the Pro Edition is designed to support applications with that require high levels of transactions per second and currency, as well as in databases in which uptime is essential.
Posted November 27, 2012
Jeff West, president of Quest International Users Group, joined by Jonathan Vaughn, Quest's executive director, talked with DBTA at Oracle OpenWorld about what's ahead for 2013. The group has launched smaller, product-concentrated events to support JD Edwards and PeopleSoft users' specific areas of interest, and expanded its range of online offerings for users who may not be able take advantage of in-person conferences. Plans are underway to help members learn about PeopleSoft 9.2 coming in March and to prepare for the looming end of support for JD Edwards World. As always, says West, Quest continues to help get information to members from Oracle and their peers. "It is always about return on investment and aligning IT with the business. That is always on the top of people's minds."
Posted November 27, 2012
A new educational webcast examines the results of the 2012 IOUG Test, Development & QA Survey, and covers the best practices and issues that it highlights. Mining the data assets being gathered from all corners of their enterprise, including transactions, customer data, employee input, and information about market conditions, has been essential to companies in uncovering new opportunities, but, in the rush to deliver results, many IT and development departments take shortcuts within the testing process, taking live data right out of production environments to run through testing, development and quality assurance processes.
Posted November 21, 2012
I was privileged to deliver a session entitled Managing SQL Server in a Virtual World at the PASS Summit 2012, the largest annual conference for Microsoft SQL Server. It was a packed house, literally at standing-room-only capacity. I delivered the session with my friend David Klee and we were swarmed by attendees after the session wrapped up. With almost 600 people in the room, we conducted one of those informal polls that speakers like to do along the lines of "Raise your hands if …" and the informal findings were very telling. Probably around 90% of the attendees used VMware and SQL Server in some capacity and at least 60% used it in production environments. Another important fact was that only 10% of the attendees were actually able to get information on the performance of the actual VMs themselves. Most had to get all of their information and support from the VM / System administration staff.
Posted November 13, 2012
Every organization that manages data using a DBMS requires a database administration group to ensure the effective use and deployment of the company's databases. And since most modern organizations of every size use a DBMS, most organizations have DBAs, or at least people who perform the on-going maintenance and optimization of the database infrastructure.
Posted November 13, 2012
In a new survey of 207 IT and data executives, respondents report that their organizations are behind the curve when it comes to managing the risks that could come from exposing live data to less secure settings—including development departments and outside contractors. This is an Achilles' heel that is being overlooked in data security efforts. The survey, which drew responses from the membership of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., and sponsored by IBM. The executive summary of the report titled "Testing the Bounds of Data Governance: 2012 IOUG Test Development & QA Survey" is publicly available - and IOUG members may access the full report from the IOUG website.
Posted November 07, 2012
Mark Clark, president of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), spoke with 5 Minute Briefing at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference about issues facing Oracle Applications users and the OAUG's plans for the year ahead. Helping members understand the significance of the cloud, Fusion applications, and EBS 12.2 are key issues, as the OAUG continues to provide education, networking opportunities, and a voice for members to Oracle, says Clark, who is also a senior partner at O2Works.
Posted October 30, 2012
HiT Software, a provider of data replication and change data capture (CDC) solutions for heterogeneous database environments, has announced the release of DBMoto 7.2, which includes support for the Actian Vectorwise analytical database. "Vectorwise is a leading analytical database that is designed to deliver an incredible speed in returning queries on big data," Carolyn Hughes, director of marketing at HiT Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. In turn, she notes, users also want to be able to get data into Vectorwise at the same level of speed so that their reporting and analytics can be as close to real time as possible. DBMoto captures data from all major relational databases including Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2 (all versions), MySQL, Informix, Sybase and others, and automatically passes data and any updates to Vectorwise.
Posted October 30, 2012
At SAP TechEd 2012 in Las Vegas, SAP unveiled its plans for SAP HANA Cloud, a next-generation cloud platform based on in-memory technology. As part of SAP HANA Cloud, the company also announced the general availability of SAP NetWeaverCloud, an open standards-based application service, and SAP HANA One, a deployment of SAP HANA certified for production use on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, as the first offerings based on SAP HANA Cloud.
Posted October 24, 2012
Percona Live 2012, a MySQL conference, was held in New York City. With nearly 300 attendees participating, the first day of the event featured tutorials with in-depth presentations on specific topics, while the second day focused on conference sessions. Also new at Percona Live this year was an exhibit hall for MySQL ecosystem participants to put their products on display and network with potential customers. Sponsors included Clustrix, Continuent, ScaleArc, Nimbus Data, Fusion-io, Tokutek, Codership, Couchbase, Akiban, Ospero, ParElastic, SkySQL, ScaleBase, and New Relic.
Posted October 24, 2012
The opportunities and challenges presented by big data are addressed in a new report summarizing the results of a survey of data managers and professionals who are part of the Independent Oracle Users Group. The survey was underwritten by Oracle Corporation and conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc. Key highlights from the survey include the finding that more than one out of 10 data managers now have in excess of a petabyte of data within their organizations, and a majority of respondents report their levels of unstructured data are growing.
Posted October 24, 2012
Survey respondents to the IOUG Big Data survey were entered into a drawing to win an iPad by providing their email addresses. The winner of the iPad in the recent IOUG Big Data study sweepstakes drawing was Thomas F. Lewandowski, an independent Oracle DBA.
Posted October 24, 2012
At OpenWorld, Oracle's annual conference for customers and partners, John Matelski, president of the IOUG, and CIO for Dekalb County, Georgia, gave his perspective on the key takeaways from this year's event. Matelski also described the user group's efforts to help the community understand the value of Oracle's engineered systems and deal with the broad implications of big data, and how the IOUG is supporting Oracle DBAs in their evolving roles.
Posted October 24, 2012
Platfora has introduced what it describes as the first in-memory business intelligence platform for Hadoop. The company unveiled its product, which is now in beta, at the Strata + Hadoop World Conference in New York. It will go GA in Q1 2013. "There is a lot of excitement out there among our early customers as well as the Hadoop distribution companies and other systems vendors," Ben Werther, founder and CEO, Platfora, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 23, 2012
Fall is my favorite time of the year for a lot of reasons. I love the cooling temperatures and the falling leaves. I enjoy the fall sports and school activities of my kids. And, perhaps best of all, I get to enjoy the yearly high-point for SQL Server professionals, the annual Community Summit put on by the Professional Association for SQL Server (www.sqlpass.org).For a technologist, the reasons to attend the annual conference of your profession should be self-evident. At the PASS 2012 Summit, there are nearly 200 technical sessions from beginner to advanced level over the duration of the week of November 5.
Posted October 23, 2012
Data management vendor Delphix has released a new version of its database virtualization platform, Delphix 3.0. Featuring new support for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Microsoft SQL Server, the latest version expands the power of virtualization across the enterprise database landscape. Virtual databases powered by Delphix 3.0 have capabilities that cannot be duplicated on physical infrastructure, the company contends. "The big benefit of our product is we help companies change their data management SLAs," Jed Yueh, CEO of Delphix, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 18, 2012
Cloudant, the provider of a globally distributed "data layer as a service," has announced upgrades to its cloud database service that include integrated, full-text indexing and search powered by Apache Lucene. With Search 2.0, developers using Cloudant can improve mobile and web apps through high-performance indexing and analysis of textual documents.
Posted October 16, 2012
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 was recently introduced with capabilities for deploying and managing business applications in an enterprise private cloud, such as Java platform-as-a-service (PaaS), enhanced business application management, and integrated hardware-software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. According to Oracle, "engineered-together management" is especially important for a consolidation platform such as Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, where multiple business applications need to run reliably and securely. In addition, as a result of demand from customers leveraging Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, a new IOUG Management Special Interest Group (SIG) has been created.
Posted October 16, 2012
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, has introduced Attunity Replicate for Exadata, a new data replication solution designed to enable quick loading of big data into and out of Oracle Exadata. The solution further expands Attunity's reach into the big data market and features targeted optimizations that result in high performance and rapid implementation.
Posted October 10, 2012
Percona, Inc. has announced the latest release of Percona Server, which it describes as its "enhanced drop-in replacement for MySQL." According to the company, Percona Server Version 5.5.27-28.0 includes new features that make it more valuable as an alternative for MySQL users. Offered free as an open source solution, Percona Server has self-tuning algorithms and support for high-performance hardware. In addition, the company is planning a two-day Percona Live Event for NYC in October and also for London in December, with speakers and tutorials spanning multiple tracks across the MySQL ecosystem. A more expansive, four-day conference, Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013, is planned for Santa Clara in April.
Posted September 26, 2012
SAP has announced the first SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark result ever for SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE). Running on the HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, together with enhancement package 5 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application, SAP Sybase ASE achieved a new number-one two-processor Linux result on the two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark.
Posted September 26, 2012
The PowerBuilder Developers Conference (PBDC), which will be co-located with SAP TechEd October 15-19, will provide an overview of what's coming in the next major release of PowerBuilder, the roadmap ahead, and everything from PowerBuilder and .NET to deploying to the cloud. In addition, a PBDC pass will allow attendees access to the TechEd keynote, meals, and the special event on Thursday.
Posted September 26, 2012
Bradmark Technologies, Inc., an established provider of database tools for enterprise monitoring and administration, has announced the expansion of its seven-year global reseller agreement with Sybase, an SAP company, through the execution of an addendum granting Bradmark the right to sell SAP Sybase database products in North America. Under this agreement, Bradmark will offer SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), SAP Sybase IQ server, SAP Sybase Replication Server and Mirror Activator database products to its existing customers and prospects through its direct sales force and marketing campaigns in the United States and Canada.
Posted September 26, 2012
The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), the leading association of Oracle database and technology professionals, is conducting a survey to review the challenges and opportunities within the manageability of your database solutions. Results of this confidential study will provide the latest industry analysis for helping organizations gain greater performance advantages from their database systems.
Posted September 26, 2012
The opportunities and challenges presented by big data are examined in a new survey of 298 data managers and professionals who are part of the Independent Oracle Users Group. The survey was underwritten by Oracle Corporation and conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc. According to this new survey, more than one out of 10 data managers now have in excess of a petabyte of data within their organizations, and a majority of respondents report their levels of unstructured data are growing. Fewer than one out of five respondents feel their IT infrastructure will be ready to handle this incoming surge of data. Protecting data overall is important, but unstructured data gets low priority at this time.
Posted September 26, 2012
If you have not heard the buzz around Oracle's Engineered Systems, then you must not be keeping up with Oracle's marketing promotions, reading any technical journals, or even just walking through any airports lately. While the marketing claims are impressive, the use of Marvel's characters was imaginative and Oracle's use of the slogan "Hardware and Software Engineered to Work Together" is enticing, you may be asking yourself, "What does all of this mean to me?" Well, let's illustrate by example.
Posted September 26, 2012
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released the latest version of its open source database, PostgreSQL 9.2. This release features improvements in performance, scalability, and flexibility, including index-only scans, linear scalability to 64 cores, and native JSON support.
Posted September 25, 2012
Data management vendor Terracotta, Inc. has released BigMemory Go, the latest innovation in the BigMemory line that allows customers to put as much data in memory as desired to speed application performance at big data scale. The product is being offered via a free 32GB per instance production license that can be deployed on as many servers as desired.
Posted September 25, 2012
Database Month will be presented from October 15 through November 12 this year in New York City. Focusing on NoSQL and NewSQL, the free "festival" features prominent speakers in the industry. Conference sponsors include Clustrix, GoChat, Couchbase, NuoDB, Aerospike, AppNexus, Pivotal Labs, FoundationDB, VoltDB, Objectivity, HPCC Systems, Pythian, Schooner, Devart, ScaleBase, Continuent, Akiban, and The Ladders.
Posted September 25, 2012
In recent years, the networks of developers, integrators, consultants, and manufacturers committed to supporting database systems have morphed from one-on-one partnerships into huge ecosystems in which they have become interdependent on one another, and are subject to cross-winds of trends and shifts that are shaping their networks. Nowhere is this more apparent than the huge ecosystem that has developed around Oracle. With Oracle's never-ending string of acquisitions, new functionality, and widespread adoption by enterprises, trends that shape this ecosystem are certain to have far-reaching effects on the rest of the IT world. Concerns that percolate through the ecosystem reflect — and influence — broad business concerns. New paradigms — from cloud computing to big data to competing on analytics — are taking root within the Oracle ecosystem long before anywhere else.
Posted September 19, 2012
Composite Software third annual Data Virtualization Day will take place October 10 in New York City. Data Virtualization Day 2012: The Logical Next Steps represents the world's largest gathering of data virtualization experts and implementers, expected to draw more than 200 Composite Software customers and prospects. Attendees will hear from leading authorities on data virtualization, data warehousing, data integration and business intelligence discussing "Data Virtualization: Why it's Logical for Business and IT."
Posted September 18, 2012
If you've worked with relational database systems for any length of time, you've probably participated in a discussion (argument?) about the topic of this month's column, surrogate keys. A great debate rages within the realm of database developers about the use of "synthetic" keys. And if you've ever Googled the term "surrogate key," you know the hornet's nest of opinions that swirls around on the topic. For those who haven't heard the term, here is my attempt at a quick summary: A surrogate key is a generated unique value that is used as the primary key of a database table; database designers tend to consider surrogate keys when the natural key consists of many columns, is very long, or may need to change.
Posted September 11, 2012
Attunity CloudBeam, Attunity's recently introduced SaaS platform for Amazon Web Services (AWS), has expanded its services to provide a new data replication-as-a-service solution for AWS' Simple Storage Service (S3). Currently available for testing, the service provides replication and synchronization of big data stored in S3 across AWS cloud regions to enable business-critical initiatives, including disaster recovery, backup and data distribution. "Amazon Web Services has a replication capability but it is far less efficient and performant than ours and this is one of the reasons that AWS is so happy to have this capability," Matt Benati, vice president of global marketing, Attunity, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted September 10, 2012
EnterpriseDB, provider of PostegreSQL and Oracle database compatibility products and services, has released a public beta of its new Multi-Master Replication (MMR) capability in Postgres Plus xDB Replication Server. According to EnterpriseDB, this will provide database administrators with improved write-availability and read-scalability, customization, database performance, as well as a cost reduction in Oracle licensing.
Posted August 28, 2012
SAP AG introduced a new solution to help organizations gain real-time insights into market trends and customer sentiment. The SAP rapid-deployment solution for sentiment intelligence with SAP HANA is intended to allow users to analyze customer sentiment from social networking sites, communities, wikis, blogs and other sources, and combine the information with CRM data. Customers that have had success getting started with big data analytics are the ones that have set out to solve a very specific use case or set out to solve a specific problem, David Jonker, director of marketing for database and technology at SAP, tells DBTA. "The rapid deployment solution for sentiment intelligence does exactly that."
Posted August 23, 2012
TransLattice, a provider of distributed databases and application platforms for enterprise, cloud and hybrid environments, has released TransLattice Elastic Database (TED), which the company describes as the world's first geographically distributed relational database management system (RDBMS). A single database can run on multiple TransLattice nodes around the world, allowing for greater data availability, performance, and scalability at a lower cost than traditional databases. "Since we have the ability to pre-position the data close to end users and have a node that's operating on their behalf in distributed queries, we can offer a much higher level of user experience than conventional systems," Michael Lyle, CTO of TransLattice, explains to DBTA. Additionally, TED makes it easier for global enterprises to comply with data jurisdiction policy requirements.
Posted August 23, 2012
Pentaho's Business Analytics 4.5 is now certified on Cloudera's latest releases, Cloudera Enterprise 4.0 and CDH4. Pentaho also announced that its visual design studio capabilities have been extended to the Sqoop and Oozie components of Hadoop. "Hadoop is a very broad ecosystem. It is not a single project," Ian Fyfe, chief technology evangelist at Pentaho, tells DBTA. "Sqoop and Oozie are shipped as part of Cloudera's distribution so that is an important part of our support for Cloudera as well - providing that visual support which nobody else in the market does today."
Posted August 23, 2012
eLearnIT's Yakov Werde will present a hands-on PowerBuilder Developers Conference (at SAP TechEd) pre-conference training course. This pre-conference session is sponsored by ISUG in cooperation with SAP and eLearnIT.
Posted August 22, 2012
Raj Rathee will be a guest speaker at certain local user group meetings this month. Raj is a senior manager within the engineering and product management organization at Sybase (SAP), and currently leads product management responsibilities for SAP Sybase ASE.
Posted August 22, 2012
SAP AG has announced a free mobile developer license, a new SAP Mobile Apps Partner program, and additional support for integrating the software development frameworks from Adobe, Appcelerator Titanium, and Sencha with the SAP mobile platform. With the new programs, SAP seeks to encourage the developer community to create new mobile apps for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) environments, David Brutman, senior director, Developer Relations at SAP, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted August 22, 2012
It is impossible to have missed the sweeping changes being thrust upon the data world due to regulatory compliance. But even if you've noticed, chances are that the sheer volume of regulations was too mind-boggling to fully digest. Compliance starts with the CEO, but it works its way down into the trenches, and impacts database administration. With that in mind, this month's column will offer a brief introduction to the regulatory landscape and its impact on database administration.
Posted August 21, 2012
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, has signed a distribution partnership agreement with Tokyo-based Insight Technology Inc. (ITI). The reseller agreement provides ITI the rights to distribute Attunity's data replication solutions in Japan, together with ITI's database machine "Insight Qube." "The partnership with Attunity is an important and strategic one for ITI," says Ichiro Obata, CEO at Insight Technology, Inc. "The key reason is big data. Making big data available is a critical need for today's top companies in Japan and all over the world, yet accessing and managing it quickly and efficiently for analytics and disaster recovery initiatives is a persistent challenge."
Posted August 14, 2012
Cloud operating system provider Nimbula has unveiled its elastic Hadoop solution with MapR Technologies, allowing users to run their Hadoop clusters on private clouds. The elasticity and multi-tenancy of Nimbula Director paired with the dependability and security of MapR Hadoop Distribution allows for a fully-functional and highly-available Hadoop cluster on a single pool of infrastructure. "What we're trying to achieve is have the power of Hadoop on top of a private cloud and bringing the best of each world to the customer," Reza Malekzadeh, Nimbula's vice president of marketing & sales, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Customers can run Hadoop and non-Hadoop workloads on the same shared infrastructure.
Posted August 14, 2012