Database Management Articles
Full 360 Inc., a New York-based systems integrator, has introduced a new release of its elasticBI platform-as-a-service (PaaS). elasticBI pairs Jaspersoft4, the open source BI application, with the Vertica Analytic Database in a PaaS offering that is tightly integrated via the Opscode Chef framework. The platform is offered by Full 360 on Amazon Web Services, the Amazon cloud. According to Full 360, elasticBI provides a complete BI-data warehouse platform that is accessible from a cost and technical perspective for small and mid-market companies, as well as enterprise departments.
Posted April 26, 2011
Oracle yesterday announced a major new version of the NetBeans integrated development environment (IDE), NetBeans IDE 7.0, allowing developers to take advantage of the newest developments in Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE). NetBeans IDE 7.0 introduces language support for the upcoming JDK 7 release, currently available as a Developer Preview.
Posted April 21, 2011
Clerity Solutions, a provider of mainframe migration, modernization and optimization solutions, announced that it has certified its UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software to work with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud engineered systems. Explaining Clerity's motivation for certifying with Oracle Exalogic and Exadata, Wendy Williams, director of marketing, Clerity, tells 5 Minute Briefing, "We are starting to see a greater interest in cloud-based initiatives from our customers. They are looking for ways not only to move their file-sharing and basic applications to the cloud but they are also starting to talk about how they can move some of their critical business-imperative applications to the cloud as well."
Posted April 21, 2011
Quest Software has unveiled Quest Backup Reporter for Oracle, a new desktop solution that offers DBAs a dashboard view of all of the Oracle backups across the enterprise that they are managing and also provides drill-down views into a single database for more detailed reporting. In addition to simplifying and cutting the time needed to report on the status of Oracle backups, the new solution is also aimed at reducing the risk associated with failed or poorly performing backups.
Posted April 21, 2011
Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) met with Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) president Mark C. Clark during last week's COLLABORATE 11 conference in Orlando, Florida. Now, more than 2 years following the financial meltdown of late 2008, it is clear that more users are again out attending COLLABORATE. "We have gone through a period of very tight IT budgets, a 2-to-4 year phase of maintenance. Everybody I am talking to is looking at opportunities to do projects this year. And if they aren't doing it this year, they are planning for it next year," said Clark, commenting on the renewed enthusiasm for attending the conference.
Posted April 19, 2011
SQL Sentry, Inc., a developer of software products that optimize the performance of Microsoft SQL Server environments, and DBSophic, a provider of performance management products for database-centric applications, have announced a new product bundle, the "Power Suite + Qure Quick Start Pack," to help SQL Server DBAs monitor, manage, troubleshoot and tune database server performance.
Posted April 19, 2011
BMC Software has announced database management solutions to help customers exploit the cost savings advantages enabled by DB2 10 for z/OS. Customers are moving more aggressively to DB2 10 than BMC has seen in the past when new versions of DB2 have been released, Robin Reddick, director, MSM Solutions Marketing at BMC Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The primary motivation that BMC is hearing from its customers is that they can achieve cost savings with the new release. According to Reddick, about 50% of BMC's customers say they will have moved to DB2 10 within 18 months of the release of the latest version, and about 25% say that they are going to skip version 9 and go right from version 8 to version 10.
Posted April 18, 2011
Platform Computing, a provider of cluster, grid and cloud management software, has announced support for the Apache Hadoop MapReduce programming model to bring enterprise-class distributed computing to business analytics applications that process big data.
Posted April 12, 2011
HP has updated its Information Management portfolio to enable organizations to reduce risk, increase efficiency and simplify the way they manage their business information. By bringing a holistic approach to information management, HP says the solutions and services will help executives harness the power of their information to make better decisions, manage for cost and compliance, and deliver the right information to the right users at the right time.
Posted April 12, 2011
EMC has announced three new additions to its EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance (DCA) line of products - the High Capacity DCA, the High Performance DCA, and the Data Integration Accelerator - as well as version 4.1 of Greenplum Database.
Posted April 12, 2011
HiT Software, Inc., a BackOffice Associates, LLC company and provider of data management products, has released HiT ODBC/DB2 v6.2 and HiT OLE DB/DB2 v4.2, the newest versions of its high-performance connectivity products specifically for application access to IBM DB2 for z/OS and IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, Windows (LUW) databases.
Posted April 12, 2011
With the annual Oracle users conference COLLABORATE about to begin, Andy Flower, president of the IOUG, spoke with 5 Minute Briefing about the IOUG's strong areas of focus in terms of overall conference content, and how the addition of the MySQL user base into the Oracle community is evolving. Citing a MySQL keynote, 75 sessions at COLLABORATE focused on MySQL, and a new MySQL Council headed by Sarah Novotny, Flower says the IOUG is making strides in giving voice to the MySQL community within the IOUG and setting a stage for positive interaction with Oracle.
Posted April 06, 2011
Oracle has announced three new integrations in support of its open and integrated technology stack. Enhancing its backup and recovery capabilities for Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliance now directly connects to the Oracle Exadata InfiniBand fabric to simplify deployments and accelerate backup and recovery time by more than 50% compared to traditional NAS systems. Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure now provides integration with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance with rapid iSCSI provisioning that automates desktop provisioning and accelerates virtual desktop deployments. Additionally, Oracle Secure Backup is qualified for Sun ZFS Storage Appliance backup and recovery with Oracle's scalable StorageTek tape libraries.
Posted April 06, 2011
DBAs and IT operational teams, pressured by the unabated flow of data streaming in from an ever wider range of sources, require proactive self-managing and automated systems to supplement or replace manual techniques and processes which are no longer scalable given the rate of data growth, according to the results of a new Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) study on database manageability.
Posted April 05, 2011
Red Gate has added support for eight source control systems - Vault Standard, Vault Professional, Kiln (Hg), Mercurial (Hg), Git, Perforce, CVS and Bazaar - to SQL Source Control, the company's unique tool for controlling all database elements from within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). As a result, developers are now able to bring their database development in line with their application development processes no matter what source control system they use. Previous versions provided support for Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Subversion (SVN).
Posted April 05, 2011
Big data is one of those terms that is quickly gaining momentum among technologists. If you watch closely, you'll notice that everyone seems to have an opinion on what "big data" means and wants to own the term. As industry experts discuss what to name this problem, in 2011, companies will be tasked with bringing big data from back office offline analytics to customer-facing 24x7 production systems. Customers are paying attention and they need solutions that support not only massive data sets but also mixed information types, extended feature sets, real-time processing, and technical teams that have not hand-coded these systems from the ground up. Here are five big data solution trends we see developing as our customers work hard to solve "big data" or "big information" problems.
Posted April 05, 2011
Dates are important. Without dates how can anything be planned? However, due dates have been know to increase in importance in the delivery of software solutions. Sometimes the due date becomes such an overwhelming creature of importance that the date is more important than following best practices, more important than verifying that what is built is correct, more important than the solution team gaining a proper understanding of the work they are attempting to perform.
Posted April 05, 2011
What will you do when you find out you're about to acquire or consolidate with another firm or division? Are you aware of the risks you may be inheriting? What data is going to demand the highest availability? What IT regulations will you have to address and how do you know if existing controls already address them? Here are 10 "data health" checks you can conduct to answer help these questions before giving a green light to an M&A or consolidation.
Posted April 05, 2011
When I meet SQL Server professionals, I am always interested to find out if they have deployed the latest version of SQL Server into production yet, if they are using Enterprise Edition, and, if so, which new features they are using and why. Nothing beats real world implementation scenarios to help get a better understanding of a feature in SQL Server. The most common Enterprise Edition SQL Server Engine features deployed (and this is not a scientific survey, by any means) appear to be Table Partitioning, Backup Compression (now in Standard Edition) and Resource Governor. The Resource Governor was the feature DBAs working with large-scale SQL Server environments seemed most excited about when SQL 2008 was first announced.
Posted April 05, 2011
In what is being hailed as an optimistic sign for the tech sector overall, Oracle announced strong results for its fiscal third quarter, including new software license revenues that were up 29%. Oracle's fiscal 2011 Q3 GAAP total revenues were up 37% to $8.8 billion, while non-GAAP total revenues were up 36% to $8.8 billion. Both GAAP and non-GAAP new software license revenues were up 29% to $2.2 billion.
Posted March 31, 2011
DBAs and IT operational teams, pressured by the unabated flow of data streaming in from an ever wider range of sources, require proactive self-managing and automated systems to supplement or replace manual techniques and processes which are no longer scalable given the rate of data growth, according to the results of a new Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) study on database manageability. With input from 445 member respondents from within the IOUG community, the survey finds that forward-looking companies, led by Oracle technologists and DBAs, are meeting their growing data management challenges by employing more advanced database management policies. This survey was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., in partnership with Oracle Corporation. Among the key findings are that more than one-third of respondents indicate their companies' data stores are increasing at a rate greater than 20% a year, and, the survey finds, this growth is a main contributor to many of the difficulties DBAs currently face.
Posted March 31, 2011
Oracle has announced a new world record non-clustered TPC-H 3TB benchmark result demonstrating the scalability of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running on Oracle's SPARC Enterprise M9000 server. "This result demonstrates the outstanding performance and scalability of the SPARC Enterprise M9000 platform," states Juan Loaiza, senior vice president, Systems Technology, Oracle. "Overall, Oracle has delivered a remarkable portfolio of benchmark results showcasing our continued efforts to create an industry standard for performance, scalability and price/performance."
Posted March 31, 2011
Tokutek has announced TokuDB v5.0, which adds hot indexing and hot column addition/deletion as well as full MVCC (multiversion concurrency control) support. TokuDB, the company's flagship product, is a scalable MySQL Storage Engine. According to the company, with the new release, customers can now speed the time to build targeted queries or revise their data model, in order to perform near real-time analysis on live production data and take advantage of dynamic business opportunities.
Posted March 31, 2011
Continuent, Inc., a provider of replication and clustering solutions for open source databases, has announced the next version of Tungsten Enterprise, a replication and data management solution for MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Posted March 31, 2011
UC4, an IT automation provider, has announced a new line of IT automation tools that supports a range of environments across enterprises. The company simultaneously announced it is shipping ONE Automation, a new solution for cross-platform automation, along with UC4 Automation Platform version 9, designed to provide end-to-end enterprise automation.
Posted March 29, 2011
Continuent, Inc., a provider of replication and clustering solutions for open source databases, announced the next version of Tungsten Enterprise, a replication and data management solution for MySQL and PostgreSQL. This latest version of Tungsten Enterprise includes a number of features to improve the management, performance, flexibility and reliability of Tungsten clusters. The new release also includes architectural changes to Tungsten Replicator, as well as connectivity improvements, upgrades to MySQL binlog parsing, and PostgreSQL replication.
Posted March 29, 2011
InterSystems Corporation, which develops and markets advanced integration, database and business intelligence technologies, has announced the winners of its 2011 Innovator Awards, which recognize those who use InterSystems technologies in new ways to create innovative applications and integration solutions. Winners were recognized at the InterSystems Global Summit 2011 conference.
Posted March 29, 2011
SAP AG and IBM have announced the first official performance results of SAP In-Memory Appliance (SAP HANA), finding that the software easily handles 10,000 queries per hour against 1.3 terabytes of data, returning results within seconds. According to the companies, the test scenarios were directly based on the query workload requirements typical in SAP customers' enterprise resource planning (ERP) reporting requirements. They accessed the data found in the sales delivery database tables for the SAP ERP application. The test was part of a joint project between the two companies to deliver real-time analytics by optimizing software and hardware, based on SAP In-Memory Computing technology and IBM's industry-leading 3850 series servers.
Posted March 23, 2011
Embarcadero is now equipping Sybase ASE developers and DBAs with a toolset to simplify their development, database administration and performance tuning tasks. The new DB PowerStudio for Sybase ASE combines several of Embarcadero's most popular database tools into an aggressively priced suite. The toolset helps Sybase ASE professionals boost productivity by eliminating time-consuming development and administration tasks, while also improving the performance and availability of their databases. "Any Sybase ASE professional will tell you that, with the right tools at their fingertips, they can do their jobs with increased efficiency and accuracy and help IT exceed their service levels," says Scott Walz, senior director of product management for Embarcadero.
Posted March 23, 2011
Sybase 365, a subsidiary of Sybase, Inc., has announced that its hosted analytics solution, Sybase Operator Analytics 365, an advanced reporting, monitoring and mobile data analytics service, has been deployed to more than 50 operators worldwide and it anticipates working with more than 90 operators by the end of April 2011. Sybase Operator Analytics 365 is backed by Sybase's column-based analytics server, Sybase IQ, enabling extreme performance with the ability to return results on billions of records in just seconds to enable operators to quickly make mission-critical decisions.
Posted March 23, 2011
Queplix Corp., a provider of data virtualization solutions, has announced two new product families to bring the benefits of data virtualization to ETL (extract, transform and load). According to Queplix, the VirtualETL and CloudETL families simplify the ETL process, enabling users to configure Queplix's Application Software Blades, providing easy connections to target applications and reducing the time required to integrate applications.
Posted March 23, 2011
A member of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) since 1992, Mark C. Clark recently took over as president of the organization. He spoke with DBTA about what's in store for members at the annual Oracle users conference COLLABORATE as well as for the year ahead. Helping members prepare for an upgrade to Oracle Applications Release 12, providing additional smaller, more targeted regional events, and a continued emphasis on a return to the basics with networking and education are at the top of his to-do list for 2011.
Posted March 23, 2011
Embarcadero has introduced DB PowerStudio for DB2 to provide DB2 developers and DBAs with a toolset that brings greater functionality and efficiency to their development, database administration and performance tuning tasks. According to Embarcadero, the new DB PowerStudio for DB2 combines several essential database tools into an aggressively priced suite that extends beyond the capabilities of IBM's database utilities. Following recent introductions of similar toolsets aimed at Oracle, SQL Server and Sybase ASE users, DB PowerStudio for DB2 meets the needs of both DB2 database developers and administrators, helping both improve the performance and availability of their databases.
Posted March 21, 2011
OpenSpan, Inc., a provider of user process management software, announced it has released support for Oracle Complex Event Processing (CEP), a solution for building applications to filter, correlate and process events in real time so that downstream applications, service-oriented architectures and event-driven architectures are driven by real-time intelligence. The new support enables OpenSpan and Oracle CEP to be used together to monitor user activity to detect and prevent fraud and compliance risks or identify cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.
Posted March 16, 2011
Furthering its support for Java-based mobile development, Oracle has announced Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Mobile Client, an extension of the Oracle Application Development Framework. A component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle ADF Mobile Client allows developers to extend their existing skills into mobile devices. It simplifies application creation and deployment using a single, standard Java user interface (UI) framework and tooling for all supported devices. Developers can build once and deploy to multiple devices - and as support for new devices is added in Oracle ADF Mobile Client, applications can be deployed to the new platforms without redevelopment. "It is all about linking the enterprise and mobile devices," Duncan Mills, senior director of product management for Oracle Fusion, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The approach takes Oracle's existing philosophy of "a single set of development skills, broadening the envelope to include native mobile applications which can run online and offline, and then managing all of the tricky data synchronization tasks on top of that."
Posted March 16, 2011
ScaleBase is seeking 50 additional customers to participate in an expanded private beta program for the ScaleBase Database Load Balancer, which enables multiple database servers to work like a single database. The ScaleBase private beta was first announced on January 1, and since then dozens of customers have registered for the program. The company is now seeking additional users of MySQL on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS who would like to try the technology.
Posted March 16, 2011
Oracle has announced that an update to MySQL 5.5 Enterprise Edition is now available. New in this release is the addition of MySQL Enterprise Backup and MySQL Workbench along with enhancements in MySQL Enterprise Monitor. In addition, recent integration with MyOracle Support allows MySQL customers to access the same support infrastructure used for Oracle Database customers to enable joint MySQL and Oracle customers to experience faster problem resolution by using a common technical support interface.
Posted March 16, 2011
Fuzzy Logix, LLC, a provider of advanced analytical solutions, has announced the availability of in-database analytics working with IBM Informix database software to serve the large base of customers who are seeking to use easily accessible analytics to gain competitive advantage. The product, DB Lytix, is a rich, in-database analytics library built during more than eleven years of extensive research on advanced analytical methods. It contains functions for mathematical and statistical analysis, data mining, and Monte Carlo simulations. With the library now ported to IBM Informix, DB Lytix can leverage the high performance of Informix to bring gains in processing speed to analytic solutions.
Posted March 15, 2011
Red Gate Software has added the ability to source control data to SQL Source Control, providing a complete tool for source controlling all database elements from within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). SQL Source Control connects users' existing source control systems - either Team Foundation Server (TFS) or Subversion (SVN) - to SQL Server. In addition to providing source control for both static data and database schema, SQL Source Control 2.0 supports a shared model that allows development team members to see each other's database changes in real time. This complements the dedicated model introduced in V1.0 last summer.
Posted March 15, 2011
ExtraHop Networks, a provider of network and application performance management solutions, announced it now supports IBM's DB2 database. The addition of DB2 rounds out ExtraHop's support for the top three providers, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. ExtraHop customers now will be able to monitor database transactions in real time without having to run invasive tools such as SQL profilers and agents, which tend to degrade performance. With the addition of DB2, the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system now "covers just about every major relational database that we've encountered within an enterprise IT environment," Jesse Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop Networks, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted March 15, 2011
On the heels of the IBM Jeopardy! Challenge, in which the IBM Watson system demonstrated the capability to understand natural language, IBM has launched a global skills initiative to educate clients, business partners, and college students on how to use IBM business analytics and information management software, and many of the underlying technologies of the Watson computing system, to capture information from new sources and use it to create business opportunities.
Posted March 15, 2011
ScaleBase is seeking 50 additional customers to participate in an expanded private beta program for the ScaleBase Database Load Balancer, which enables multiple database servers to work like a single database. The ScaleBase private beta was first announced on January 1, and since then dozens of customers have registered for the program. The company is now seeking additional users of MySQL on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS who would like to try the technology.
Posted March 15, 2011
Revolution Analytics, a commercial provider of software and services based on the open source R project for statistical computing, and IBM Netezza have announced a partnership to integrate Revolution R Enterprise and the IBM Netezza TwinFin Data Warehouse Appliance. According to the vendors, this will enable customers seeking to run high performance and full-scale predictive analytics from within a data warehouse platform to directly leverage the capabilities of the open source R statistics language. Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will work together to create a version of Revolution's software that takes advantage of IBM Netezza's i-class technology so that Revolution R Enterprise can run in-database in an optimal fashion. General availability of this integrated solution is currently planned for later this year.
Posted March 15, 2011
Revelation Software has announced the availability of the latest release of OpenInsight Development Suite (OI), version 9.2.1, and the Universal Driver 4.7. OI 9.2.1 features OpenInsight for Web v.1.1. (O4W), a new version of the web 2.0 development toolkit that enables OpenInsight and MultiValue developers to rapidly create browser based forms, reports, menus, dashboards and programs. Additionally, in OI 9.2.1, Source Code Management (SCM), a new feature, enables source code to be grouped into modules and saved as a unique version as the code is compiled. With the new release, the system editor has also been redesigned to improve speed and functionality; and the U2 connector has been redesigned to utilize the UniObjects .NET library instead of the Intercall libraries, a change that allows the implementation of connection pooling.
Posted March 09, 2011
Microsoft extended support for all editions of SQL Server 7.0 ended on Jan. 11. Considering that this edition was initially replaced 11 years ago by SQL Server 2000 (and there have been three more major releases since), this may not seem to be big news. However, I'm always amazed by the number of DBAs I meet who are still responsible for keeping a few instances of this, or even version 6.5, running in production.
Posted March 09, 2011
2010 was a very good year for open source databases, with the top RDBMSs like Oracle's MySQL and PostgreSQL showing momentum with impressive customer gains and new releases that delivered much-desired functionality. Everything points to similar energy in 2011 with the top analyst groups and big-name system integrators like Accenture proclaiming "the coming age of open source." A study done by Accenture in late 2010 showed that more than two-thirds of organizations anticipate increased investment in open source, with more than one-third expecting to migrate mission-critical software to open source in the next 12 months.
Posted March 09, 2011
One of the ongoing goals of database administration is to minimize downtime and improve availability. If the DBMS is down, data cannot be accessed. If the data is not available, applications cannot run. And if your applications cannot run, your company is losing business. Lost business translates into lower earnings and perhaps even a lower stock valuation for your company. These are all detrimental to the business and therefore, the DBA is called upon to do everything in his or her power to ensure that databases are kept online and operational.
Posted March 09, 2011
A new survey of database administrators and managers reveals that a pervasive culture of complacency hampers information security efforts, and as a result of lax practices and oversight, sensitive data is being left vulnerable to tampering and theft. While tools and technologies provide multiple layers of data security both inside and outside the firewall, organizations appear to lack the awareness and will to make security stick. The study, "Data in the Dark: Organizational Disconnect Hampers Information Security," was conducted by Unisphere Research among 761 members of PASS, the Professional Association for SQL Server, in September 2010. The survey was fielded in partnership with Application Security, Inc.
Posted March 09, 2011
Following the recent introductions of DB PowerStudio for Oracle, and DB PowerStudio for SQL Server, Embarcadero is now equipping Sybase ASE developers and DBAs with a toolset to simplify their development, database administration and performance tuning tasks. The new DB PowerStudio for Sybase ASE combines several of Embarcadero's most popular database tools into an aggressively priced suite. The toolset helps Sybase ASE professionals boost productivity by eliminating time-consuming development and administration tasks, while also improving the performance and availability of their databases.
Posted March 08, 2011