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Database Management

Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs) continue to do the heavy lifting in data management, while newer database management systems are taking on prominent roles as well. NoSQL database systems such as Key-Value, Column Family, Graph, and Document databases, are gaining acceptance due to their ability to handle unstructured and semi-structured data. MultiValue, sometimes called the fifth NoSQL database, is also a well-established database management technology which continues to evolve to address new enterprise requirements.



Database Management Articles

Revelation Software has announced that David Hendershot has joined the company as member of its software development team. David has been a MultiValue programmer working primarily on the Universe platform for 10 years. He has supported the CUBS software package for a tax /medical collection agency in Pennsylvania, and started his MultiValue career at Market America helping develop the back end of their web site which also ran on the Universe database platform.

Posted December 19, 2012

Oracle has announced new software enhancements to the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster engineered system that are intended to enable customers to consolidate any combination of mission-critical enterprise databases, middleware and applications on a single system and rapidly deploy secure, self-service cloud services.

Posted December 12, 2012

The University of Minnesota, a top research institution comprised of five campuses, 65,000 students and 25,000 employees, has made systematic changes and improved database administration efficiency with Oracle Exadata Database Machine. By hosting its IT environment on two Oracle Exadata Database Machine half racks, the university consolidated more than 200 Oracle database instances into fewer than 20, enabling it to reduce data center floor space and total cost of ownership.

Posted December 12, 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 December 12, 2012

Within the information technology sector, the term architect gets thrown around quite a lot. There are software architects, infrastructure architects, application architects, business intelligence architects, data architects, information architects, and more. It seems as if any area may include someone with an "architect"status. Certainly when laying out plans for a physical building, an architect has a specific meaning and role. But within IT "architect" is used in a much fuzzier manner.

Posted December 11, 2012

Not long in the past, SQL Server licensing was an easy and straightforward process. You used to take one of a few paths to get your SQL Server licenses. The first and easiest path was to buy your SQL Server license with your hardware. Want to buy a HP Proliant DL380 for a SQL Server application? Why not get your SQL Server Enterprise Edition license with it at the same time? Just pay the hardware vendor for the whole stack, from the bare metal all the way through to the Microsoft OS and SQL Server.

Posted December 06, 2012

A proper database design cannot be thrown together quickly by novices. A practiced and formal approach to gathering data requirements and modeling data is mandatory. This modeling effort requires a formal approach to the discovery and identification of entities and data elements. Data normalization is a big part of data modeling and database design. A normalized data model reduces data redundancy and inconsistencies by ensuring that the data elements are designed appropriately.

Posted December 06, 2012

While no one can dispute the importance of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to organizational performance and competitiveness, executives in charge of these systems are under intense pressure to stay within or trim budgets. Close to half of the executives in a new survey say they have held off on new upgrades for at least a few years. In the meantime, at least one out of four enterprises either are scaling back or have had to scale back their recent ERP projects due to budget constraints.

Posted December 06, 2012

In-memory technology provider Terracotta, Inc. has announced that javax.cache, a caching standard for Java applications, has entered Draft Review Stage under the Java Community Process. It provides a standard approach for how Java applications temporarily cache data, an essential technology for in-memory solutions and a critical factor in achieving high performance and scalability of big data.

Posted November 27, 2012

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

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

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