Emerging and newer vendors can offer fresh, innovative ways of dealing with data management and analytics challenges. Here, DBTA looks at the 10 companies whose approaches we think are worth watching.
Posted June 06, 2016
Thanks to the cloud and other empowering technologies such as Hadoop and Apache Spark, we're at the tipping point for big data. These technologies now provide a path to big data success for companies who otherwise lack the specialized big data skills or heretofore proprietary (and expensive) infrastructure to do it themselves. As 2016 progresses, we'll see the broader market put big data capabilities to work and the benefits of big data will, in turn, spread beyond the privileged few companies that were early big data adopters.
Posted May 25, 2016
The OpenStack Trove database as a service (DBaaS) project has come a long way since incubation in Grizzly and Havana, and integration in the Icehouse release in April 2014. At that time, it supported single instances of MongoDB, MySQL and a few other databases. Today, Trove supports Cassandra, Couchbase, CouchDB, DataStax Enterprise, DB2 Express, MariaDB, MongoDB, MySQL Percona, Percona XtraDB Cluster, Redis, and Vertica.
Posted May 25, 2016
COLLABORATE, the annual conference presented each year by the OAUG, IOUG and Quest, provides the opportunity to reflect on key changes in the Oracle ecosystem and allows the users groups to engage with their constituents about the areas of greatest importance. With the COLLABORATE 16 conference now behind her, Dr. Patricia Dues, the new president of the OAUG, talked with DBTA about what OAUG members are concerned with now and how the OAUG is helping them address emerging challenges.
Posted May 25, 2016
The world's data has doubled in 18 months' time. The industry estimates that the global amount of storage will reach 40 ZB by 2020. Historically, storage architectures were built on solutions that could only scale vertically. This legacy approach to storage presents significant challenges to being able to store the tremendous quantities of data being created today in a way that is cost-effective and maintains high levels of performance. Today, most of the world's data centers are still using vertical scaling solutions for storage, which means that organizations are seeking alternatives that allow them to scale cheaply and efficiently in order to remain competitive. And now, with software defined storage moving forward, we see the use of more scale-out storage solutions in data centers.
Posted May 04, 2016
The elastic and distributed technologies used to run modern applications require a new approach to operations — one that learns about your infrastructure and assists IT operators with maintenance and problem-solving. The inter-dependencies between new applications are creating chaos in existing systems and surfacing the operational challenges of modern systems. Solutions like micro services architectures alleviate the scalability pains of centralized proprietary services but at a tremendous cost in complexity.
Posted May 04, 2016
The latest release of Oracle Database (12.1.0.2) offers a unique set of features that portend increases in application workload execution, especially for analytics and data warehousing queries. This release, debuts Oracle Database In-Memory which provides a new columnar format - the In-Memory Column Store (IMCS) - for data that is likely to be accessed regularly for aggregation or analysis, as well as other features such as In-Memory Aggregation and In-Memory Joins that potentially offer several orders of magnitude of performance improvement. Finally, the new In-Memory Advisor makes short work of determining exactly which database objects are most likely able to take advantage of the IMCS.
Posted May 04, 2016
The COLLABORATE 16 conference for Oracle users kicked off with a presentation by Unisphere Research analyst Joe McKendrick who shared insights from a ground-breaking study that examined future trends and technology among 690 members of three major Oracle users groups.
Posted April 25, 2016
The greatest power in using IoT-derived insights is the ability respond to opportunities or threats immediately. However, enterprises largely have focused on historical reporting and will need to significantly modernize their analytics capabilities—both in understanding current events and predicting future outcomes—to take advantage of the new insights that IoT data can bring.
Posted April 25, 2016
The need for data integration has never been more intense than it has been recently. The Internet of Things and its muscular sibling, the Industrial Internet of Things, are now being embraced as a way to better understand the status and working order of products, services, partners, and customers. Mobile technology is ubiquitous, pouring in a treasure trove of geolocation and usage data. Analytics has become the only way to compete, and with it comes a need for terabytes—and gigabytes—worth of data. The organization of 2016, in essence, has become a data machine, with an insatiable appetite for all the data that can be ingested.
Posted April 25, 2016
Database as a service, also known as DBaaS, offers a solution to some key issues that have vexed enterprise database shops for years. That is, how to maintain and update back-end technologies; how to integrate data from multiple, changeable sources without the need to rewrite the applications that depend on them; and how to make data readily accessible to end users who need it regardless of the device they are using.
Posted April 25, 2016
Ever wonder what happened to artificial intelligence? It's gotten easier and more accessible. In fact, AI's been embedded into some of the most fundamental aspects of data management, making those critical data-driven processes more celeritous and manageable. Best of all, AI is directly responsible for producing this effect for end users—those who rely on data most to do their jobs.
Posted March 31, 2016
Virtualized Oracle databases, just like all virtual machines, share physical server resources with other virtual machines running on the same hypervisor. We'll call virtual machines that reside on the same hypervisor "siblings." VM sibling rivalries occur due to resource shortages caused by improper virtual machine placement. Databases generally have more severe ramifications when resource shortages occur than other virtualized applications, making good sibling behavior crucial for your Oracle databases.
Posted March 31, 2016
Successful data-driven organizations are differentiated by the fact that they recognize the need for new tools and technologies that support data visualization, and enable a visual culture of data discovery in its people, processes, and technologies.
Posted March 31, 2016
From POODLE, Heartbleed, and Shellshock in 2014, to the Hacking Team breach, OpenSSL's FREAK, and a variety of zero-day vulnerabilities in 2015, we have seen a consistent ramp-up in security threats and successful data breaches. 2016 is the time for businesses to take their collective managerial and accounting heads out of the sand and build security into every level of their products and processes.
Posted March 22, 2016
Many businesses have implemented new enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, expecting business benefits to magically fall into place, only to be disappointed. According to recent studies, 25% of ERP implementations fail, and at least 80% exceed budget or take longer than the originally planned development time. This is not good for business in more way than one.
Posted March 22, 2016
In recent years there has been an explosion of innovation in the database market. A popular rating report recently included more than 30 vendors in its 2015 report. And, organizations today are realizing how specific and complex their evolving needs are, and that they cannot solely rely on the "big three."
Posted March 22, 2016
For those whose brackets took a blow after just the first several games of the 2016 NCAA men's basketball championships, this year's tournament may provide a case in point on the value of analytics over sentiment.
Posted March 22, 2016
COLLABORATE 16 Starts April 10 at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Posted March 21, 2016
The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) has represented the voice of Oracle technologists and professionals for more than 20 years, and we are so proud of how our community has not just grown but maintained its adaptive approach that centers on peer-to-peer education and know-how. We hope that you share our sense of pride as we celebrate the technology community's marquee event: COLLABORATE 16-IOUG Forum.
Posted March 21, 2016
The OAUG volunteers planning COLLABORATE 16: Technology and Applications Forum for the Oracle Community (April 10-14 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas) are themselves Oracle users and technologists, understanding innately the myriad options and challenges faced by the wider user community in a period of rapid change and transformation. With participation and contributions from all corners of the user community, COLLABORATE offers the information and perspective to make sense of it all.
Posted March 21, 2016
Quest International Users Group supports customers using JD Edwards or PeopleSoft ERP, as well as related Oracle edge applications—products that are important to the success for many companies in today's challenging business environment. At COLLABORATE 16 and throughout the year, Quest is your top resource!
Posted March 21, 2016
MySQL is a popular open source database and one of the top relational databases—and with good reason. It is an extremely feature-rich and powerful database platform. With all its positives, however, MySQL has a number of challenges that can limit its ability to perform with the agility and performance businesses increasingly require. Here's a quick look at how to optimize MySQL for your ever-changing environment.
Posted March 03, 2016
As more businesses leverage applications that are hosted in the cloud, the lines between corporate networks and the internet become blurred. Accordingly, enterprises need to develop an effective strategy for ensuring security. The problem is, many of today's most common approaches simply don't work in this new cloud-based environment.
Posted March 03, 2016
The world of IT operations has always had a big data problem. Instrumentation of end users, servers, application components, logs, clickstreams, generated events and incidents, executed notifications and runbooks, CMDBs, Gantt charts—you name it, people in the IT operations area have had to cope with mountains of data. And yet the scope of the problem has been enlarged once again, thanks to industry-wide trends such as bring-your-own-device, the Internet of Things, microservices, cloud-native applications, and social/mobile interaction.
Posted March 03, 2016
To Avoid Costly Outages in 2016, Build IT Maturity Beyond Monitoring
Posted February 24, 2016
The rapid change taking place in software-defined applications and infrastructure was one of the top 10 IT tech trends to watch last year. Certainly, some advancements have been made in this area over the past year. But how far does the industry still need to go? Here are 5 trends that will shape application and infrastructure availability in 2016.
Posted February 24, 2016
There is no denying the fact that cloud-based software and computing services are now accepted as the norm. This change has profound implications on how software applications are architected, delivered, and consumed. This change has ushered in a new generation of technology and an entirely new category in data integration. Today, there are 10 new requirements for an enterprise data integration technology:
Posted February 24, 2016
Storage requirements are growing by leaps and bounds, and more organizations are turning to cloud computing to manage the load. However, cloud isn't necessarily seen as the best approach to data storage bursting—rather, it's mainly being used for backup and for hosting development and test environments, according to a new survey.
Posted February 10, 2016
Cloud-borne data is becoming commonplace—at least at the edges of the enterprise. Organizations are relying, both formally and informally, on cloud-based services for supplemental storage, file sharing, and content management. The challenge now is to bring core enterprise data into the cloud, to render data ranging from financials to sales to performance analytics as services.
Posted February 10, 2016
The business world continues to shortchange a critical step between storing and analyzing the explosion of new data expected over the coming years. A business can quickly move from the old world of siloed, unusable data to a new one where stakeholders around the globe can find information in a few minutes from their local access points. The "findability" of data is particularly important for Global 1000 companies pursuing Industrial Internet-related innovation.
Posted January 27, 2016
As data continues to explode, DBAs must constantly stay a step ahead by finding new ways to improve database efficiency and performance. Managing data in today's complex IT environment requires creative approaches to a number of different DBA processes. Here are useful tips in five main categories that can help DBAs keep their heads above water and allow their companies to more effectively utilize their data to drive business value.
Posted January 27, 2016
When it comes to data protection, every business environment has a unique set of requirements and needs, whether they are looking to secure legacy applications, mobile data, cloud apps, virtualized environments, or any number of different workloads. Unique data requires a unique solution, and yet countless vendors are advertising one-stop solutions described as "one-size-fits-all." But buyer beware: When something seems too good to be true, it usually is, and an easy, one-size-fits-all solution may save you some short term time and money, but can result in major headaches and unforeseen costs in the long run.
Posted January 27, 2016
Recent shifts are driving the adoption of a number of technologies and tools, including containers, which are garnering big attention from investors. The primary advantage of containers is allowing applications to look uniform as they cross between non-production and production environments, and between on-premise and cloud. However, containers on their own, while critical to speeding adoption of DevOps and hybrid cloud deployment, are not sufficient.
Posted January 07, 2016
Exponential data growth is hitting organizations of all sizes hard. It's not enough to merely add more capacity; recovery point objectives must be met, and time is money when it comes to data recovery. The simple truth is that to be effectively managed, adequately protected and completely recovered, your data size must be shrunk.
Posted January 07, 2016