Data Warehousing Articles
Key findings from a new study, "Big Data Opportunities," will be presented at Big Data Boot Camp at the Hilton New York. Big Data Boot Camp will kick off at 9 am on Tuesday, May 21, with a keynote from John O'Brien, founder and principal of Radiant Advisors, on the dynamics and current issues being faced in today's big data analytic implementations. Directly after the opening address, David Jonker, senior director of Big Data Marketing, SAP, will showcase the results of the new big data survey, which revealed a variety of practical approaches that organizations are adopting to manage and capitalize on big data. The study was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., and sponsored by SAP.
Posted May 16, 2013
It seems that juggling is the most useful of all skills when embarking on a data warehousing project. During the discovery and analysis phase, the workload grows insanely large, like some mutant science fiction monster. Pressures to deliver can encourage rampant corner-cutting to move quickly, while the need to provide value urges caution in order not to throw out the proverbial baby with the bath water as the project speeds along. Change data capture is one area that is a glaring example of the necessary juggling and balancing.
Posted May 09, 2013
The conference agenda as well as the list of speakers is now available for DBTA's Big Data Boot Camp, a deep dive designed to bring together thought leaders and practitioners who will provide insight on how to collect, manage, and act on big data. The conference will be held May 21-22 at the Hilton New York. SAP is the diamond sponsor, and Objectivity and MarkLogic are platinum sponsors of the two-day event.
Posted April 25, 2013
Data keeps growing, systems and servers keep sprawling, and users keep clamoring for more real-time access. The result of all this frenzy of activity is pressure for faster, more effective data integration that can deliver more expansive views of information, while still maintaining quality and integrity. Enterprise data and IT managers are responding in a variety of ways, looking to initiatives such as enterprise mashups, automation, virtualization, and cloud to pursue new paths to data integration. In the process, they are moving beyond the traditional means of integration they have relied on for years to pull data together.
Posted April 03, 2013
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, released Attunity Replicate 2.1, a high-performance data delivery solution that adds improvements for data warehousing. Attunity Replicate's new performance enhancements support many data warehouses, including Amazon Redshift, EMC Greenplum and Teradata.
Posted March 13, 2013
SAP AG has introduced a new version of its Sybase IQ disk-based column store analytics server. The overriding theme of this new release, which will be generally available later in the first quarter, "is positioning IQ 16 to go from terabytes to petabytes," Dan Lahl, senior director of product marketing at SAP, tells 5 Minute Briefing. To accomplish this, IQ 16 provides enhancements in three critical areas.
Posted February 27, 2013
Hortonworks, a leading contributor to Apache Hadoop, has released Hortonworks Sandbox, a learning environment and on-ramp for anyone interested in learning, evaluating or using Apache Hadoop in the enterprise. This tool seeks to bridge the gap between people who want to learn Hadoop, and the complexity of setting up a cluster with an integrated environment that provides demos, videos, tutorials.
Posted February 27, 2013
MarkLogic said it plans to deliver an enterprise-grade application and analytics software solution based on the new Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software. The Intel Distribution will be combined with the MarkLogic Enterprise NoSQL database to support real-time transactional and analytic applications.
Posted February 26, 2013
Attunity is developing a solution for fast data loading into Amazon Redshift, AWS's new data warehouse in the cloud. The Attunity solution is expected to be available for customer preview in March 2013.
Posted February 21, 2013
Hortonworks, a contributor to Apache Hadoop, has submitted two new incubation projects to the Apache Software Foundation and also announced the launch of the new "Stinger Initiative." These three projects seek to address key enterprise requirements regarding Hadoop application security and performance.
Posted February 21, 2013
IBM reports a surge in mainframe sales in the most recent quarter, surpassing all previous quarters. This announcement was part of the company's release of quarterly and annual results. Overall, total quarterly revenue was down 1% from last year, and down 2% for the year.
Posted February 04, 2013
Actian Corp. and Pervasive Software Inc. have entered into a definitive merger agreement through which Actian will acquire all of Pervasive's outstanding shares for $9.20 per share. Actian products include Action Apps, Vectorwise, the analytical database, Ingres, an independent mission-critical OLTP database, in addition to the Versant Object Database, which Actian added to its portfolio through another recent merger in which Actian acquired all the outstanding shares of Versant Corporation. According to the company, the deal values Pervasive at $161.9 million and will accelerate Actian's ability to deliver its vision of providing organizations with the capability to take action in real time as their business environment changes.
Posted January 31, 2013
Today's data warehouse environments are not keeping up with the explosive growth of data volume (or "big data") and the demand for real-time analytics. Fewer than one out of 10 respondents to a new survey say their data warehouse sites can deliver analysis in what they would consider a real-time timeframe. Nearly 75% of respondents believe that in-memory technology is important to enabling their organization to remain competitive in the future. Yet, almost as many also indicate they lack the in-memory skills to deliver even current business requirements. These are among the findings of a new survey of 323 data managers and professionals who are part of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). The survey was underwritten by SAP Corporation and conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc.
Posted January 29, 2013
Databases are hampered by a reliance on disk-based storage, a technology that has been in place for more than two decades. Even with the addition of memory caches and solid state drives, the model of relying on repeated access to the permanent information storage devices is still a bottleneck in capitalizing on today's "big data," according to a new survey of 323 data managers and professionals who are part of the IOUG. Nearly 75% of respondents believe that in-memory technology is important to enabling their organization to remain competitive in the future. Yet, almost as many also indicate they lack the in-memory skills to deliver even current business requirements. The research results are detailed in a new report, titled "Accelerating Enterprise Insights: 2013 IOUG In-Memory Strategies Survey."
Posted January 24, 2013
Despite the rise of big data, data warehousing is far from dead. While traditional, static data warehouses may have indeed seen their day, an agile data warehouse — one that can map to the needs of the business and change as the business changes — is quickly on the rise. Many of the conversations today around big data revolve around volume and while that is certainly valid, the issue is also about understanding data in context to make valuable business decisions. Do you really understand why a consumer takes action to buy? How do their purchases relate? When will they do it again? Big data is limited when it comes to answering these questions. An agile approach — one that gives even big data a life beyond its initial purpose — is the value data warehousing can bring to bear and is critical to long-term business success.
Posted December 19, 2012
The University of Minnesota, a top research institution comprised of five campuses, 65,000 students and 25,000 employees, has made systematic changes and improved database administration efficiency with Oracle Exadata Database Machine. By hosting its IT environment on two Oracle Exadata Database Machine half racks, the university consolidated more than 200 Oracle database instances into fewer than 20, enabling it to reduce data center floor space and total cost of ownership.
Posted December 12, 2012
At OpenWorld, Oracle's annual conference for customers and partners, John Matelski, president of the IOUG, and CIO for Dekalb County, Georgia, gave his perspective on the key takeaways from this year's event. Matelski also described the user group's efforts to help the community understand the value of Oracle's engineered systems and deal with the broad implications of big data, and how the IOUG is supporting Oracle DBAs in their evolving roles.
Posted December 12, 2012
Tervela Turbo is now certified on CDH4 (Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop Version 4). Introduced in October, Tervela Turbo, a high-performance data movement engine, helps Cloudera customers implement mission-critical Hadoop systems with reliable data capture, high-speed data loading into HDFS, disaster recovery for Hadoop, and ETLT data warehousing. Tervela has also joined the Cloudera Connect Partner Program.
Posted December 12, 2012
Amazon Web Services Inc. has announced the limited preview of Amazon Redshift, a managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud, which aims to enable customers to increase the speed of query performance when analyzing data sets using the same SQL-based BI tools they use today. "Over the past 2 years, one of the most frequent requests we've heard from customers is for AWS to build a data warehouse service," says Raju Gulabani, vice president of Database Services, AWS.
Posted November 28, 2012
Jeff West, president of Quest International Users Group, joined by Jonathan Vaughn, Quest's executive director, talked with DBTA at Oracle OpenWorld about what's ahead for 2013. The group has launched smaller, product-concentrated events to support JD Edwards and PeopleSoft users' specific areas of interest, and expanded its range of online offerings for users who may not be able take advantage of in-person conferences. Plans are underway to help members learn about PeopleSoft 9.2 coming in March and to prepare for the looming end of support for JD Edwards World. As always, says West, Quest continues to help get information to members from Oracle and their peers. "It is always about return on investment and aligning IT with the business. That is always on the top of people's minds."
Posted November 27, 2012
MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the MapR Distribution for Hadoop, has formed a partnership with Hadapt, which offers a data analytics platform for natively integrating SQL with Apache Hadoop. The partnership enables customers to leverage MapR's Hadoop distribution in conjunction with Hadapt's Interactive Query capabilities to analyze all types of data, structured, semi-structured and unstructured, in a single, enterprise platform. Partnerships such as the one with Hadapt enable a broad community of users to have access to Hadoop data while also leveraging the existing skill sets of those users, Jack Norris, vice president of MapR, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted November 15, 2012
Cloudera, provider of Apache Hadoop-based software and services, announced the first big data management solution that allows batch and real-time operations on any type of data within one scalable system. Cloudera Enterprise Real-Time Query (RTQ), powered by Cloudera Impala, improves the economics and performance of large scale enterprise data management, allowing organizations to process data at petabyte scale and interact with that data in real time all on the same system.
Posted November 06, 2012
Open source software vendor Talend announced that it has added big data profiling for Apache Hadoop and support for NoSQL databases in the upcoming release of its integration platform, Talend v5.2. Data profiling, the process of evaluating the character and condition of data stored across the enterprise, is a critical step toward gaining control over organizational data, and is emerging as a big data best practice. "Profiling allows you to understand what you have in your Hadoop cluster and how this data can be used for your big data integration and management project," Yves de Montcheuil, Talend's vice president of marketing, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted November 06, 2012
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, is partnering with Teradata to offer Attunity Replicate for Teradata, a big data replication solution designed to enable loading of heterogeneous data to Teradata with high performance, efficiency and ease-of-use.
Posted October 25, 2012
Kognitio is allowing companies to download a fully functional copy of its software at no charge, and with no time restrictions. The company, which made the announcement at O'Reilly Strata and Hadoop World conference, said it is offering a full-featured, perpetual use license of up to 128 gigabytes without an expiration period or other limited functions normally found in "trialware." This capability gives companies the ability to do in-memory analytics on, for example, more than 500 million customer records at once.
Posted October 25, 2012
At SAP TechEd 2012 in Las Vegas, SAP unveiled its plans for SAP HANA Cloud, a next-generation cloud platform based on in-memory technology. As part of SAP HANA Cloud, the company also announced the general availability of SAP NetWeaverCloud, an open standards-based application service, and SAP HANA One, a deployment of SAP HANA certified for production use on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, as the first offerings based on SAP HANA Cloud.
Posted October 24, 2012
The opportunities and challenges presented by big data are addressed in a new report summarizing the results of a survey of data managers and professionals who are part of the Independent Oracle Users Group. The survey was underwritten by Oracle Corporation and conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc. Key highlights from the survey include the finding that more than one out of 10 data managers now have in excess of a petabyte of data within their organizations, and a majority of respondents report their levels of unstructured data are growing.
Posted October 24, 2012
Survey respondents to the IOUG Big Data survey were entered into a drawing to win an iPad by providing their email addresses. The winner of the iPad in the recent IOUG Big Data study sweepstakes drawing was Thomas F. Lewandowski, an independent Oracle DBA.
Posted October 24, 2012
SAP AG announced the availability of the SAP Precision Retailing solution, which is designed to help companies reach consumers at the moment of decision. The enterprise solution delivers personalized offers and suggestions in real time to consumers across multiple channels, including mobile devices, in-store kiosks and websites. "The solution we just launched bridges the gap between the consumer at the point of decision who needs to make a purchase and the ocean of data - and we extract the needle in the haystack - that piece of information that will help the consumer make a decision," Herve Pluche, vice president, Retail Consumer Mobile Initiative, SAP Labs, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 11, 2012
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, has introduced Attunity Replicate for Exadata, a new data replication solution designed to enable quick loading of big data into and out of Oracle Exadata. The solution further expands Attunity's reach into the big data market and features targeted optimizations that result in high performance and rapid implementation.
Posted October 10, 2012
Are today's data systems — many of which were built and designed for legacy systems of the past decade — up to the task of moving information to end users at the moment they need it? And is this information timely enough? In many cases, there's a lot of work that still needs to be done before real-time information, drawn from multiple sources, becomes a reality. A new survey of 338 data managers and professionals who are subscribers to Database Trends and Applications reveals that real-time data access is still a distant pipe dream for at least half of the companies represented in the survey. The survey, conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., in partnership with Attunity in March of 2012, finds that close to half of the survey respondents, 48%, report that relevant data within their organizations still take 24 hours or longer to reach decision makers. This suggests that much data is still batch-loaded overnight.
Posted October 09, 2012
The opportunities and challenges presented by big data are examined in a new survey of 298 data managers and professionals who are part of the Independent Oracle Users Group. The survey was underwritten by Oracle Corporation and conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc. According to this new survey, more than one out of 10 data managers now have in excess of a petabyte of data within their organizations, and a majority of respondents report their levels of unstructured data are growing. Fewer than one out of five respondents feel their IT infrastructure will be ready to handle this incoming surge of data. Protecting data overall is important, but unstructured data gets low priority at this time.
Posted September 26, 2012
Data management vendor Terracotta, Inc. has released BigMemory Go, the latest innovation in the BigMemory line that allows customers to put as much data in memory as desired to speed application performance at big data scale. The product is being offered via a free 32GB per instance production license that can be deployed on as many servers as desired.
Posted September 25, 2012
Infobright has introduced a database appliance purpose-built for the analysis of machine-generated data called Infopliance. Integrating Infobright's analytic database with dedicated server and storage hardware, the new appliance is intended to provide customers with a cost-effective, scalable solution for extracting insight from growing volumes of real-time and historical information generated by web logs, network logs, call detail records, security data, and sensor data. "We have seen a growing need among customers who are going from one terabytes to two terabytes, to 15 terabytes, to 30 terabytes. They are experiencing very explosive data growth, and we began to realize that there would be a market for delivering a purpose-built machine-generated data appliance," Don DeLoach, president and CEO of Infobright, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted September 24, 2012
The first computer program I ever wrote (in 1979, if you must know) was in the statistical package SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), and the second computer platform I used was SAS (Statistical Analysis System). Both of these systems are still around today—SPSS was acquired by IBM as part of its BI portfolio, and SAS is now the world's largest privately held software company. The longevity of these platforms—they have essentially outlived almost all contemporary software packages—speaks to the perennial importance of data analysis to computing.
Posted September 19, 2012
In recent years, the networks of developers, integrators, consultants, and manufacturers committed to supporting database systems have morphed from one-on-one partnerships into huge ecosystems in which they have become interdependent on one another, and are subject to cross-winds of trends and shifts that are shaping their networks. Nowhere is this more apparent than the huge ecosystem that has developed around Oracle. With Oracle's never-ending string of acquisitions, new functionality, and widespread adoption by enterprises, trends that shape this ecosystem are certain to have far-reaching effects on the rest of the IT world. Concerns that percolate through the ecosystem reflect — and influence — broad business concerns. New paradigms — from cloud computing to big data to competing on analytics — are taking root within the Oracle ecosystem long before anywhere else.
Posted September 19, 2012
SAP AG introduced a new solution to help organizations gain real-time insights into market trends and customer sentiment. The SAP rapid-deployment solution for sentiment intelligence with SAP HANA is intended to allow users to analyze customer sentiment from social networking sites, communities, wikis, blogs and other sources, and combine the information with CRM data. Customers that have had success getting started with big data analytics are the ones that have set out to solve a very specific use case or set out to solve a specific problem, David Jonker, director of marketing for database and technology at SAP, tells DBTA. "The rapid deployment solution for sentiment intelligence does exactly that."
Posted August 23, 2012