Database Management Articles
Ingres Corp. has been rebranded as Actian Corporation and unveiled a new strategy to enable companies to develop Action Apps which it describes as lightweight, consumer-style applications that automate business actions triggered by real-time changes in data. "The name change is symbolic of a completely new approach," Greg Wood, Actian CFO, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Ingres is becoming Actian to take action on big data, powered by VectorWise, the world's fastest data analytics engine."
Posted October 04, 2011
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 during a presentation at the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters. Based on Oracle's new SPARC T4 servers, the engineered system exploits the same parallelism and data compression provided by Oracle's other engineered systems, the Exadata and Exalogic, said Ellison, and, importantly, provides a smooth upgrade path to the SPARC Solaris installed base.
Posted October 04, 2011
At Sybase TechWave, Sybase launched Sybase PowerBuilder 12.5, the second .NET release of its rapid application development tool. PowerBuilder 12.5 provides a fast and cost-effective solution for creating modern and visually appealing business applications on the Microsoft Windows 32 ((Win32) and .NET Frameworks.
Posted September 28, 2011
At SAP TechEd 2011 in Las Vegas, SAP AG announced two new solutions built on SAP HANA, the company's in-memory computing platform. The two new solutions - SAP Smart Meter Analytics software powered by SAP HANA and SAP COPA Accelerator software - were developed by SAP product and design teams working in collaboration with customers. According to SAP the new applications will provide users with real-time insight into "big data," allowing them to leverage large amounts of information for analysis, planning, and forecasting and simulations in a more fluid, natural way versus traditional approaches.
Posted September 28, 2011
Sybase, Inc., an SAP company, has announced the general availability of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 15.7. Sybase ASE 15.7 provides a cost-efficient relational database management system (RDBMS) for managing very large data sets for the most demanding applications. The new version of the enterprise data management solution saves disk space, increases performance and scalability on parallel hardware, and efficiently manages unstructured data.
Posted September 28, 2011
Attunity Ltd., a provider of real-time data integration software, has introduced Attunity Replicate, high-performance data replication software. The new enterprise data replication solution emphasizes simplified user experience, quick time to value, and low cost of ownership, Itamar Ankorion, vice president of Business Development and Corporate Strategy, Attunity, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Attunity will present Attunity Replicate at Oracle OpenWorld, October 3-5, at booth #3728.
Posted September 27, 2011
Oracle has announced the Oracle Database Appliance - targeted at small and midsize enterprises and departments that want higher availability for their application databases. Like Exadata, it is an engineered system that combines hardware and software.
Posted September 22, 2011
Quest Software has announced the availability of a new release of Toad for Oracle, the flagship product in the Toad portfolio. The new release contains a number of notable new capabilities, including the new Code Analysis feature which provides a more flexible and intuitive way to perform code reviews and analysis.
Posted September 21, 2011
Allround Automations has released a free plug-in that directly connects its PL/SQL Developer IDE with Red Gate Software's Oracle database deployment tools. "Combining PL/SQL Developer and the Deployment Suite for Oracle from Red Gate gives any database developer an extremely powerful environment for development and deployment," Tom Harris, Red Gate's product manager for Oracle tools, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted September 20, 2011
As the world's most popular open source database, MySQL's speed, reliability, and ease of use have made user-generated content and social media available to the masses. In the 18 months since the Oracle acquisition of MySQL, Oracle continues to develop MySQL internally and integrate community patches. Under Oracle's stewardship, MySQL released its first new major version in 2 years.
Posted September 14, 2011
Cost containment is an important IT department goal in this day and age of financial austerity. Every decision regarding your computing environment must be weighed not only against the value it can deliver to your organization but also upon its cost to procure, implement, and maintain. If a positive return on investment cannot be rapidly delivered, then the software (or hardware) won't be adopted.
Posted September 14, 2011
When assembling a database design, one of the keys for success is consistency. There should be more than just similarity in the way things are named, the manner in which tables or groups of tables are constructed; the manifestation of these elements should follow standards and practices that are documented and understood. If one tries to rely on the idea that individual developers will simply look at existing tables and glean standards via osmosis as they add on or create new tables, then one does not actually have any standards at all.
Posted September 14, 2011
As data grows, the reflex reaction within many organizations is to buy and install more disk storage. Smart approaches are on the horizon but still only prevalent among a minority of companies. How is it data has grown so far so fast? Technology growth along the lines of Moore's Law (doubling every 18 months) has made petabyte-capable hardware and software a reality. And data growth itself appears to be keeping pace with the hardware and systems. In fact, a petabyte's worth of data is almost commonplace, as shown in a new survey conducted by Unisphere Research among members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). In "The Petabyte Challenge: 2011 IOUG Database Growth Survey," close to 1 out of 10 respondents report that the total amount of online (disk-resident) data they manage today-taking into account all clones, snapshots, replicas and backups-now tops a petabyte.
Posted September 14, 2011
VoltDB, Inc. today announced the general availability of VoltDB open source relational database management system (RDBMS) version 2.0. VoltDB is a distributed, in-memory database designed for applications that are pushed beyond their limits by high-volume data sources. The new release adds new features for developer productivity, database durability and recovery, including performance and interoperability improvements.
Posted September 13, 2011
InterSystems Corporation, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with offices in 23 countries, has announced the strategic acquisition of Siemens Health Services (SHS) France from its Siemens parent company. SHS, a provider of healthcare solutions to hospitals in France, will now operate as InterSystems SAS. This acquisition moves InterSystems into a strong position in France, which is one of the world's top five healthcare IT markets by revenue, and marks the entry of InterSystems TrakCare advanced clinical applications into this market.
Posted September 13, 2011
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has announced the release of PostgreSQL 9.1. This latest version of the open source database offers important new features such as synchronous replication, K-Nearest Neighbor indexing, and foreign data wrappers.
Posted September 13, 2011
The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) has announced its program of hosted meetings and educational sessions at the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld 2011 conference Oct. 2-6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Throughout the week of the event, OAUG members will facilitate more than 30 educational sessions addressing the training and professional development needs of Oracle Applications users.
Posted September 13, 2011
For many organizations, data is not only crossing into the hundreds of terabytes, but into the near-petabyte (PB) and multi-petabyte range. In a new survey sponsored by Oracle and conducted by Unisphere Research among members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), "The Petabyte Challenge: 2011 IOUG Database Growth Survey," close to one out of 10 respondents report that the total amount of online (disk-resident) data they manage today - taking into account all clones, snapshots, replicas and backups - tops a petabyte.
Posted September 07, 2011
At an event for customers, partners and industry experts in Redwood Shores that was also presented live online, Oracle announced Oracle VM 3.0, the latest release of its server virtualization and management solution. According to the company, Oracle VM 3.0 is suitable for all data center workloads and features new policy-based management capabilities, advanced storage management via the Oracle VM Storage Connect plug-in API; centralized network configuration management, improved ease-of-use and Open Virtualization Format (OVF) support.
Posted September 07, 2011
Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Application Express Release 4.1, which enhances existing functionality and adds data upload capabilities. Oracle Application Express is a "no-cost" option included with all editions and releases of Oracle Database 11g that allows developers, using only a web browser, to build and deploy professional and scalable applications for Oracle databases.
Posted September 07, 2011
Gluster, a provider of open source storage solutions, has just released a version of its storage system that includes support for Apache Hadoop. GlusterFS 3.3 beta 2 employs standard file system APIs available in Hadoop to provide a new storage option for Hadoop deployments.
Posted September 06, 2011
Ingres, an open source database provider, has begun shipping VectorWise for Windows, intended to address analytics requirements within Microsoft technology shops. This latest release of VectorWise provides analytics and interactive reporting against big data sets for companies with Windows-based architectures.
Posted September 06, 2011
Versant Corporation, a provider of specialized data management software, has released a new object database that delivers improved performance and scalability. Versant Object Database 8.0 Service Release 2 (VOD 8 SR2) is designed to provide scalable real-time analytical performance for large, complex applications. SR2 adds several enhancements, including an improved query optimizer now supporting compound indexes, a refined horizontal scale out with support of distributed databases, upgraded production environments due to new online database configuration capabilities, and general multi-core performance improvements.
Posted September 06, 2011
Calpont Corporation, a provider of analytic databases has announced a a bi-directional data connector between InfiniDB and Hadoop. By providing a bi-directional connector for InfiniDB customers, Calpont says, it eliminates the need to custom code Hadoop for high performance analytics since InfiniDB's columnar architecture is optimized for rapid and easy access to highly dimensional data and has the flexibility, scale and horsepower to work with massive data sets. "For doing high-performance analytics, a high-performance database like InfiniDB is the proper database to be doing the analytics in," Nick Ochoa, vice president of marketing, Calpont, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted September 01, 2011
At VMworld 2011 yesterday, VMware, Inc. announced a new database provisioning and operations solution designed to deliver a database as a service model for the enterprise. Described as an extension of VMware's Cloud Application Platform strategy, VMware vFabric Data Director aims to give IT the ability to control and manage a growing set of heterogeneous databases through policy-based automation, while streamlining application development via a self-service provisioning model for developers to rapidly access the database services needed for modern applications. Built on VMware vSphere, vFabric Data Director will also extend the benefits of virtualized infrastructures to the database tier, optimizing resource utilization for increased operational efficiency and cost savings.
Posted August 30, 2011
MarkLogic Corporation has announced that Kaplan Publishing, a publisher of academic and professional development resources, has built a new iOS application using MarkLogic Server as the platform beneath a customized digital content reader developed by Bluefire Productions. Kaplan Mobile allows registered students to download a free electronic copy of their course books to their mobile devices. The application is available for download for free from the Apple iTunes Store for all iOS devices. MarkLogic has worked on mobile interfaces for customers in the past, some in the government, David Gorbet, vice president, Product Strategy at MarkLogic, tells 5 Minute Briefing, "but this is the first time to my knowledge that anybody is doing a full course's worth of material as a mobile application."
Posted August 30, 2011
InterSystems Corporation has announced that application partner Medical Systems, Inc. (MSI) is launching an application for community health centers (CHCs) built on the InterSystems Caché high-performance object database. The new version of Vision:CHC is a comprehensive offering that includes the full range of facilities needed for CHCs to fulfill Meaningful Use and Patient-centered Medical Home criteria. "Modern community health centers exist in an environment requiring multiple levels of regulatory and reporting requirements on a federal, state and often local level," Matt Nee, InterSystems vice president of North American Sales, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted August 30, 2011
Quest Software, Inc. expanded its Toad product portfolio with the addition of free and commercial versions of Toad for Sybase. The new suite adds Sybase ASE, Sybase IQ and SQL Anywhere to Toad's list of supported relational and non-relational database platforms. "Quest has historically supported Sybase through a number of other products - such as Toad for Data Analysts and Spotlight - but there hasn't been a true Toad UI for Sybase development and administration until now," Claudia Fernandez, director of product management, Toad solutions for Quest, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted August 24, 2011
Registration is now open for TechWave 2011, which will be co-located with SAP TechEd, September 12-16 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, NV. TechWave will continue to deliver targeted training on Sybase products, plus offer attendees access to TechEd keynote sessions, exhibits, special event and other networking functions.
Posted August 24, 2011
The rise of big data has garnered much of the attention in the data management arena lately. But it is not simply the sheer volume of data that is challenging data professionals. Many new types and brands of DBMSs are also popping up across organizations, bringing new problems for the data professionals who are tasked with managing them, and also giving rise to scores of "accidental database administrators" with no formal DBA training, a new Unisphere Research study reveals. The results of the survey are explained in a research report titled "Data Cross-Currents: 2011 Survey on Cross-Platform Database Administration."
Posted August 24, 2011
The rise of big data has garnered much of the attention in the data management arena lately. But it is not simply the sheer volume of data that is challenging data professionals. Many new types and brands of DBMSs are also popping up across organizations, bringing new problems for the data professionals who are tasked with managing them, and also giving rise to scores of "accidental database administrators" with no formal DBA training, a new Unisphere Research study reveals. The results of the survey are explained in a report titled "Data Cross-Currents: 2011 Survey on Cross-Platform Database Administration," now available from Quest Software.
Posted August 24, 2011
EnterpriseDB, a provider of PostgreSQL and Oracle compatibility products and services, has announced general availability of Postgres Enterprise Manager, which allows developers and DBAs to monitor, manage, and tune both PostgreSQL and Postgres Plus Advanced Server installations regardless of the platform they run on - from a single console application. "Now, customers can easily ramp up their PostgreSQL footprint at a fraction of the cost of proprietary alternatives," said Ed Boyajian, president and CEO of EnterpriseDB.
Posted August 23, 2011
HP and Autonomy Corporation plc have announced plans for HP (through an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary, HP SPV) to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Autonomy for £25.50 ($42.11) per share in cash. "Together with Autonomy, we plan to reinvent how both unstructured and structured data is processed, analyzed, optimized, automated and protected. Autonomy has an attractive business model, including a strong cloud-based solution set, which is aligned with HP's efforts to improve our portfolio mix," said Léo Apotheker, HP president and chief executive officer, in a statement issued by the company.
Posted August 23, 2011
Ntirety has announced that it will undergo the MSPAlliance's (MSPA) Unified Certification Standard for Cloud and Managed Service Providers audit (UCS). UCS is the first program of its kind, specifically designed and created to provide business consumers of cloud and managed services with the assurance that the service provider they hire meets or exceeds the highest principles of quality in areas such as financial stability, facilities, managed services practices, and customer satisfaction. "As the market matures for remote DBA companies, the bar has been getting raised higher and higher," Michael Corey, founder and president of Ntirety, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted August 18, 2011
Over the years, countless papers and articles have been written on enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation project success rates and why ERP projects fail. Interestingly enough, the reasons that projects fail are the same today as they were 10 years ago: lack of top management commitment, unrealistic expectations, poor requirements definition, improper package selection, gaps between software and business requirements, inadequate resources, underestimating time and cost, poor project management, lack of methodology, underestimating impact of change, lack of training and education, and last, but not least, poor communication.
Posted August 11, 2011
The Broadway tune goes, "The sun will come out tomorrow ... it's only a day away." The words from this optimistic jingle are often heard on IT projects that are overburdened with features and functions. On any project of significant size the list of desired things often becomes larger than the budgeted resources or time. Faced with limiting circumstances, the only option becomes aligning the work effort with the constraints and only doing what fits within those constraints. The items are "timeboxed," and the amount of planned work is exactly the amount of allowed work. Some things remain in, while other features are left out. Alternatively, responsibility for controlling a project may be ignored and the end date arrives with some things simply not completed. Essentially, a project is timeboxed by default.
Posted August 11, 2011
Often, when the business of data management frustrates me, I look for inspiration in what may seem at first glance to be odd places. For instance, I think the Lewis Carroll "Alice in Wonderland" books offer sage advice for our particular industry.
Posted August 11, 2011
In last month's column, "2012 Might Really Be the End of the World as We Know It," I described a number of major developments in the IT industry that are likely to disrupt the life of database professionals everywhere. I categorize those four disrupters - virtualization, cloud computing, solid state drives (SSD), and advanced multi-core CPUs - into two broad groups. I'm going to continue an analysis of these disruptive technologies in inverse order. Today, let's discuss SSDs.
Posted August 11, 2011
Quest Software, Inc. expanded its Toad product portfolio with the addition of free and commercial versions of Toad for Sybase. The new suite adds Sybase ASE, Sybase IQ and SQL Anywhere to Toad's list of supported relational and non-relational database platforms. Toad is a cross-platform database management toolset. There have already been more than 15,000 downloads of the Toad for Sybase beta, which has many of the same features as Toad's other database products, Claudia Fernandez, director of product management, Toad solutions for Quest, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted August 09, 2011
InterSystems Corporation has announced that Partners HealthCare Systems is now providing clinicians throughout its integrated delivery network (IDN) with mobile access to its electronic health record (EHR). The InterSystems CACHÉ high-performance object database is the foundation platform for Partners HealthCare's EHR and for hundreds of clinical applications used by thousands of clinicians throughout the IDN. "Mobility is becoming a watchword in the healthcare sector," observes Paul Grabscheid, InterSystems vice president of Strategic Planning. "The Partners mEHR provides clinicians with the ultimate in mobility by delivering the information they want, when and where they want it, in the presentation form that they want and expect."
Posted August 09, 2011
The rise of big data has garnered much of the attention in the data management arena lately. But it is not simply the sheer volume of data that is challenging data professionals. Many new types and brands of DBMSs are also popping up across organizations, bringing new problems for the data professionals who are tasked with managing them, and also giving rise to scores of "accidental database administrators" with no formal DBA training, a new Unisphere Research study reveals.
Posted August 04, 2011
Oracle's S. Ramakrishnan, group vice president and general manager for Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications, was in New York last week to provide an update on how financial services institutions are leveraging tailored technology from Oracle - including the recently announced Oracle Financial Services Data Warehouse - to manage the complex information needed to compete profitably and effectively address stringent regulatory requirements.
Posted August 04, 2011
Oracle announced that early access to new features of MySQL 5.6 is available for the community to test, deploy and provide feedback.The latest features are focused on better scalability, performance and flexibility. Enhancements include the InnoDB storage engine, to provide support for full text search, greater performance for write-intensive applications, and better scalability under high concurrency/user loads. In addition, new and improved MySQL replication features are intended to help with performance, scale-out and data integration.
Posted August 04, 2011