DBTA E-EDITION
July 2017
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Trends and Applications
Big data has been in vogue for years, but many businesses are having a lot of difficulty harnessing value and gaining insights from the voluminous amounts of data they collect. However, there is an often-ignored set of data in the enterprise that is truly actionable, data that can be described as "active" data.
DevOps—the close working alliance between development and operations teams—is catching hold in enterprises dependent on continuously and frequently delivering new versions of software, whether for internal consumption or external services.
It's been long acknowledged that data is the most precious commodity of the 21st-century business, and that all efforts and resources need to be dedicated to the acquisition and care of this resource. Lately, however, executives have become enamored with the vision of transforming their organizations into "data-driven" enterprises, which move forward into the future on data-supported insights. So, what, exactly, does the ideal "data-driven enterprise" look like?
Columns - Database Elaborations
For everyone normalizing their designs, just remember: There ain't no such thing as a partial foreign key. When a project pretends that partial foreign keys are a valid concept, the end result is a database model that either lies to viewers, or does not give them the necessary information to readily join tables together.
Columns - DBA Corner
As every DBA should know, DBMS data is typically persisted using disk storage. So the data is stored on disk and when it is later read or modified it has to be accessed and changed on disk. To optimize these processes, most DBMSes use a cache, or buffer pool, to stage data in memory when it is accessed. By moving the data to memory subsequent accesses to the same data can be more efficient because disk I/O can be bypassed.
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
The next release of Microsoft SQL Server, announced as SQL Server 2017, is available for download in CTP2 at http://tinyurl.com/SQLvNextLinux and offers many cool new features. One set of features that I really like focus on adaptive query processing. These new features speed processing of workloads, especially those that have historically been the hardest to tune.
Columns - MongoDB Matters
MongoDB has become a favorite among developers in no small part because of its alignment with modern software development practices. Its flexible schemas are compatible with agile software development and the JSON-based document structure is well-matched with modern JavaScript-centric web architectures. However, databases don't exist solely for the convenience of software developers: Data in a database is a critical business asset.