DBTA E-EDITION
April 2021

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Trends and Applications

Innovative enterprise tech startups are emerging to tackle both new and longstanding challenges and problems in ways never thought possible. Many of these companies have fresh approaches to accelerate digital transformation, expand AI and analytics initiatives, streamline DevOps, improve data observability, and more. Here are 16 startups DBTA thinks are worth watching in 2021.

With the 1-year anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown just behind us, there has been a lot of dialogue regarding what different industries have experienced over the past year. Acknowledging this dubious anniversary, we sat down to collect our thoughts and share a few advisements with respect to our small corner of the legal and tech industry.

In December 2020, U.S. officials scrambled to shore up national cyberse­curity after Russian government hackers breached the Treasury, State, and Com­merce departments. The extent and fall­out of these cyberattacks is still coming to light. While these were certainly the most high-profile recent cyberattacks, they were not alone. Cyberattacks, including those with the aims of ransom and extortion, are on the rise around the globe, and even small companies make tempting targets.

Social engineering, or an attempt to manipulate human behavior through specific, orchestrated actions to gain access to restricted information or systems without permission, is reportedly being used by 84% of hackers. The challenge is that humans are hard wired to trust, often willing to accept someone at his or her word, and social engineering attacks are all about taking advantage of that inherent want to trust. Unfortunately, this is not a good mix and often leads to humans becoming the weakest link in the security chain,

It's time to cast your vote for the annual Database Trends and Applications Readers' Choice Awards, a competition in which the winning information management solutions, products, and services are selected by you, our readers.

As we continue through 2021 and in-memory computing platforms mature, we will see the number of industries and companies adopting these solutions con­tinue to grow. This trend will last far beyond the effects of the pandemic as companies shift their focus to meeting new strategic and competitive demands driven by digital transformation initia­tives. Increasing adoption of in-memory computing will also be accompanied by the following key trends powered by the technology's real-time capabilities and massive scalability

As companies embrace digital trans­formation across the enterprise, it is data and the effective use of it that determines whether new technologies such as AI, auto­mation, and analytics will be successful. The importance of having an effective data man­agement and data warehousing operation is more critical than ever before.


Columns - Database Elaborations

All data architects should con­sider themselves change agents for the organiza­tions in which they work. But at the same time, business also wants to keep much the same. Such discoveries can be confusing when business is say­ing that change is desired, but their actions seem focused on preventing change. It can suggest the Albert Ein­stein quote (or the Baba Ram Dass quote, based on which version of history one sub­scribes to) that "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."


Columns - DBA Corner

You would think that with the towering importance of data in today's modern organization that data modeling would be viewed as extremely important by management and IT professionals, so it is somewhat ironic that the age of big data has coincided with a long-term slide in data administration and modeling in many organiza­tions. This is not a situation that should continue to be tolerated.


Columns - Quest IOUG Database & Technology Insights

During Quest Forum Digital Event: Database & Technol­ogy Week, Kurt Engeleiter, product manager of database manageability at Oracle, presented on database optimization and how to get the best out of Oracle Enterprise Manager. Accord­ing to Engeleiter, there are five steps to follow in order to maximize performance of Oracle Enterprise Manager.


Columns - SQL Server Drill Down

An important new set of features for security and confidential computing was announced at the recent Microsoft Ignite virtual conference and are now in public preview. Although the name doesn't exactly trip off your tongue, Always Encrypted with Secure Enclaves offers important new capabilities for orga­nizations that need greater control and security over their data while also enjoying the agility, scalability, and productivity gains of the public cloud.


Columns - Next-Gen Data Management

Remember, all data is dirty—you won't be able to make all of it perfect. Your focus should be on making it good enough to pass along to the next person. The first step is to examine the data and ask yourself, "Does this data make sense?" Data should tell a story or answer a question. Make sure your data does, too. Then, before you do anything else, make a copy—or backup—of your data before you make the smallest change.


Columns - Emerging Technologies

There's still life in the data lake concept, as evidenced by the growing success of Dremio. Dremio describes itself as "the cloud data lake" platform. It provides a cloud-based engine that layers over cloud object storage such as Amazon S3, Azure's Data Lake Storage, or even legacy Hadoop systems.Why would Dremio succeed where Hadoop ulti­mately failed?


MV Community

Action Technology, a Midlothian Virginia company, chose Pick Cloud to aid in their transition from on-premise to the cloud. "Pick Cloud really saved our bacon," says Sharon Daniel, VP, and CFO of Action Technology. "If it weren't for Mark's team we wouldn't be in the position we are today after our server crashed."

Ellucian Colleague offers a versatile higher education ERP to make processes more effective and keep students, faculty, and staff informed. Entrinsik Informer works natively with Colleague's UniData database for easy ad hoc reporting.

Rocket Software, a global technology leader that develops enterprise modernization and optimization solutions, is launching version 1.3 of the new Rocket MultiValue Integration Server (MVIS). Additionally, the platform is now available at no cost to maintenance partners and customers on the Rocket UniVerse and UniData components of the MultiValue application platform.

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