DBTA E-EDITION
March 2022

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Trends and Applications

Data center downtime and outages are undoubtedly costly—with 40% costing between $100,000 and $1 million each according to a 2020 Uptime Institute report. Ironically, data center management hasn't always been driven by much data. The good news is data center failures are largely avoidable. The bad news is most operators aren't employing the data center analytics solutions needed to proactively predict and prevent downtime. 

Each year, Data Summit features industry-leading experts covering the topics that matter most for data professionals who want to stay on top of the latest technologies and strategies. The conference program is now available for review, and a variety of pass options are being offered, including special pricing for attendees who register early.

Anyone investing in an SAP ERP solution running on Oracle Linux is clearly serious about ensuring that their critical line of business systems run smoothly, predictably, and efficiently. It should go without saying that those operations will be consistently accessible and run without unexpected interruption. Saying nothing, though, would be a mistake, for there's nothing magical about Oracle Linux that inherently guarantees high availability (HA) for an SAP landscape. Without proper planning and an infrastructure configured for HA, that big investment is vulnerable.

Major technology trends are reshaping the DBA role at many organizations. The size and complexity of database environments continues to grow with higher data volumes, more workloads, and an increasing rate of database deployments that need to be managed. To help IT decision makers and database professionals tackle these changes, challenges, and opportunities, DBTA recently held a special roundtable webinar with Kathryn Sizemore, senior MySQL/MariaDB database administrator, Datavail and Devin Gallagher, senior sales engineer, IDERA.

IBM Security has released its annual X-Force Threat Intelligence Index unveiling how ransomware and vulnerability exploitations together were able to hurt businesses in 2021, further burdening global supply chains, with manufacturing emerging as the most targeted industry.IBM Security X-Force said that while phishing was the most common cause of cyberattacks in general in the past year, it observed a 33% increase in attacks caused by vulnerability exploitation of unpatched software.

Junk data is any data that is not governed. Junk data starts to accumulate when individuals make copies of data from a larger dataset for a particular use case, make changes to it, and then do not integrate those changes into the larger set. By taking the time to invest in data integrity upfront, a company can ensure the quality and security of its data assets are appropriately available to the business ultimately saving time and money.

In the world of DataOps, the dual mandate of data democratization and the need for privacy, security, and compliance are pushed front and center. The speed and simplicity of cloud analytics adoption is opening a new world of risk for corporate data governance teams mandated with ensuring organizations remain compliant in an increasingly complex world of global regulations. In short, managing data and access governance in a traditional top-down, IT-controlled manner, while managing data, analytical, and visualization technologies via a decentralized, agile DataOps framework, is a recipe for disaster.


Columns - Database Elaborations

Often one reads a book or hears a presenter making a pun about relational theory being called "relational" because of entities being "related."  Such references are nothing but misplaced puns. Relational theory derives the relational in the name from the idea that a "relation" is a mathematical term synonymous for a "set" and each entity represents a set of some sort. However, relationships between entities are still a very important concept albeit not an eponymous one.


Columns - DBA Corner

Standard SQL defines four isolation levels that can be set using the SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL statement: Serializable, Repeatable Read, Read Committed, and Read Uncommitted. Although all of the popular relational DBMSs support isolation level, the exact naming and implementation will vary.


Columns - SQL Server Drill Down

Microsoft announced at the end of February 2022 that significant changes are in store across its SQL Server analytics products. To set the context, the broader enterprise IT marketplace was still primarily on-prem when Microsoft first introduced its cloud analytics products in 2017. Since that time, we've seen a flood of migrations to the cloud with analytical workloads at the forefront, since a cloud-based approach to analytics offers greatly improved manageability, deployment simplicity, as well as standard cloud benefits like flexibility, cost control, and scalability.


Columns - MongoDB Matters

MongoDB initially gained traction as a backend for web applications, in which it was mostly concerned with so-called "CRUD" operations—creating, reading, updating, and deleting documents. Since then, MongoDB has broadened its capabilities remarkably, but it is still typically deployed as an operational database rather than as an analytic DB or data warehouse.


MV Community

By utilizing Entrinsik Informer Dashboards, Canadore College found an effective solution for visualizing its data. Informer is making faculty much more receptive to data, as it is allowing them to not only be more involved in the decisions being made around their programs but shows them exactly why decisions are being made.

Rocket Software recently assisted SMC transform its business with the help of the Rocket MultiValue Integration Server (MVIS). Focused on the mission of advancing automation for its clients, SMC also needed to automate transactions and provide real-time access to its ERP system to improve employee productivity and customer experiences.

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