Database Management Articles
When IBM developers set out to build the next version of Informix their goal was to build on the foundation of one of the more mature, effective and reliable pieces of information management software in the industry. With the 10th anniversary of the IBM acquisition of Informix fast approaching, they knew that the 11.7 release would be closely watched by clients and partners alike.
Posted October 12, 2010
As a consultant, I get to meet many varied SQL Server professionals on a regular basis. One of the most common conversations we've had over the last few years surrounds the loss of control the DBA has experienced due to a couple of advances in technology.
Posted October 12, 2010
As bizarre as it seems, no one sabotages our efforts more easily than ourselves. We often leave ourselves vulnerable to failure whenever we respond to requests for project estimates. Like "A Tale of Two Cities" estimating can bring our best and our worst. In offering estimates, individuals may undercut their own efforts. For example, a developer may only consider time coding, and fail to include enough headroom for testing, rework, or documentation. While some aspects of these estimating attempts might suggest a passive-aggressive approach to avoid tasks, much of this estimate-short-sheeting often results from a desire to please and provide a number to make management "happy." There is always a desire from management to have more things done, and to do things quickly on every project. Even when not stated, this unspoken desire colors the responses of the individuals doing the estimating.
Posted October 12, 2010
If you are a DBA, or a database performance analyst, chances are that you deal with performance-related issues regarding your database systems every day of the week. But have you ever stopped for a moment and tried to define what you mean when you say "database performance"? Doing so can be a worthwhile exercise, if only to organize your thoughts on the matter. Think about it; don't we need a firm definition of database performance before we can attempt to manage the performance of our databases?
Posted October 12, 2010
Revelation Software has announced that OpenInsight 9.2.1 is now in development and will include a new Version Control module, as well as O4W (OpenInsight for Web) release 1.1.
Posted October 12, 2010
Oracle introduced the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-8 at Oracle OpenWorld. The new configuration extends the Oracle Exadata Database Machine product family with a high-capacity system for large OLTP, data warehousing and consolidated workloads. "The data volumes now are huge, and they are going to keep getting bigger and as they grow rapidly, you will need more and more power," said Oracle president Mark Hurd, commenting on the release during a keynote at the Oracle conference.
Posted October 06, 2010
5 Minute Briefing: Oracle had the opportunity to meet and speak with Pythian chief technology officer Alexander Gorbachev during Oracle OpenWorld about the company's achievement of four specializations under the OPN (Oracle PartnerNetwork) Specialized Program. Pythian, already a Platinum member of the OPN, has met a series of demanding technical and business requirements to earn the specializations in Oracle Database 11g, Real Application Clusters (RAC), Database Performance Tuning, and Oracle Linux.
Posted October 06, 2010
At Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle unveiled Oracle Fusion Applications. Commenting on the debut of the portfolio during a keynote that highlighted major OpenWorld announcements, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, explained that Oracle Fusion Applications takes the best features of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, the Oracle E-Business Suite, and Siebel and re-implements them on top of a modern middleware infrastructure entirely written in Java.
Posted October 06, 2010
Just 6 months after launching Ignite 8, Confio Software's newest release of its performance analysis tool, the company announced that nearly 90% of Confio's Oracle customer base has upgraded to Ignite 8 representing over 10,000 monitored Oracle instances worldwide.
Posted October 06, 2010
Building on the theme of "freedom of platform choice" Quest Software announced the beta launch of Toad Extension for Eclipse at Oracle OpenWorld. The newest addition to the Toad product family allows Java developers to perform essential Oracle development tasks, such as writing, editing, browsing and querying, directly from within the Eclipse IDE, harnessing the power of Toad for Oracle. This follows Quest's recent announcement on the availability of Toad for Cloud Databases.
Posted October 06, 2010
Estimates put the amount of data in existence at this time at more than a zettabyte (or a trillion gigabytes), which would be the equivalent of 75 billion fully loaded iPads. All this data is streaming into and through enterprises from transactions, remote devices, partner sites and user-generated content, with formats varying from structured, relational data to graphics and videos.
Posted October 06, 2010
Estimates put the amount of data in existence at this time at more than a zettabyte (or a trillion gigabytes), which would be the equivalent of 75 billion fully loaded iPads. All this data is streaming into and through enterprises from transactions, remote devices, partner sites and user-generated content, with formats varying from structured, relational data to graphics and videos.
Posted September 28, 2010
Just 6 months after launching Ignite 8, Confio Software's newest release of its performance analysis tool, the company has announced that nearly 90% of Confio's Oracle customer base has upgraded to Ignite 8 representing over 10,000 monitored Oracle instances worldwide. "DBAs are busy people and they won't upgrade unless there is really something of value there, so the fact that they have really jumped on the new release is because they saw it and they said, this is something we absolutely want to do," Don Bergal, chief operating officer at Confio, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted September 28, 2010
Revelation Software has announced that OpenInsight 9.2.1 is now in development and will include a new Version Control module, as well as O4W (OpenInsight for Web) release 1.1. O4W 1.0 was released earlier this year as part of the latest release of OpenInsight. "When we released O4W 1.0, which was within our OpenInsight 9.2 release, we received so much feedback - not only to the initial release but even during the beta testing phase," says Robert Catalano, director of sales at Revelation, that Revelation had to stop the development of O4W at a certain point in order to get the documentation in sync. This resulted in a backlog of features that needed to be included, "and they are showing up now in the 9.2.1 release," he tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted September 22, 2010
Rocket Software is offering two webinars in October. The first is an overview of the upcoming U2 University event, to be held in Denver, November 9-11. Registration is now open for Oct 6, 2010 9 am MDT and Oct 6, 2010 4 pm MDT.
Posted September 22, 2010
InterSystems Corporation will next week roll out a new version of its Caché high-performance object database. The new release targets the growing demand by CIOs for economical high availability by introducing database mirroring, while also now addressing Java developers' need for high-volume high-performance processing combined with persistent storage for event processing systems. Robert Nagle, InterSystems vice president for software development, recently chatted with 5 Minute Briefing about the release and the new features it offers. Commenting on the growing interest in NoSQL databases, Nagle observes that many of the beneficial characteristics people see in NoSQL are in fact true of Caché - a flexible data model and zero DBA cost. "But for us, what is unique is that it is not NoSQL, it is that it needs to be SQL - without the overhead of relational technology - because I think SQL is extremely important for almost every class of application that is deployed."
Posted September 22, 2010
Application Security, Inc., a provider of database security, risk and compliance (SRC) solutions for the enterprise, has announced the addition of Rights Management to its flagship enterprise platform, DbProtect. Determining who has rights to what data can be a laborious task and it is something that many organizations avoid because they think the task is impossible to complete, Josh Shaul, vice president of product management, AppSec, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We realized we could solve the problem very effectively with software." The new Rights Management module allows information security analysts, business managers, and database administrators (DBAs) to automate user entitlement reviews in enterprise database environments, and also enables organizations to meet compliance regulations mandating the implementation of strong access control measures, such as those required by the Payment Card Industry - Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS.)
Posted September 21, 2010
EnterpriseDB, which provides products, services, support and training based on the PostgreSQL open source database project, has announced support for the newly released PostgreSQL 9.0 open source relational database. PostgreSQL 9.0 includes more than a dozen major improvements that enhance every aspect of database application design and performance, including built-in replication and hot standby capabilities that give PostgreSQL 9.0 the high availability required for the "scale out" and failover architectures that characterize cloud computing and other demanding application environments, as well as 64-bit Windows support. The new release also that simplifies major upgrades by removing the need for the "dump/load data" procedure required in prior versions and instead performs an in-place upgrade, which is much easier and faster.
Posted September 21, 2010
InterSystems Corporation will next week roll out a new version of its Caché high-performance object database. The new release targets the growing demand by CIOs for economical high availability by introducing database mirroring, while also addressing Java developers' need for high-volume high-performance processing combined with persistent storage for event processing systems. Robert Nagle, InterSystems vice president for software development, recently chatted with 5 Minute Briefing about the release and the new features it offers. Commenting on the growing interest in NoSQL databases, Nagle observes that many of the beneficial characteristics people see in NoSQL are in fact true of Caché - a flexible data model and zero DBA cost. "But for us, what is unique is that it is not NoSQL, it is that it needs to be SQL - without the overhead of relational technology - because I think SQL is extremely important for almost every class of application that is deployed."
Posted September 21, 2010
Symantec Corp. announced the availability of Symantec Enterprise Vault 9.0 and Enterprise Vault Discovery Collector, technology to help organizations store, manage and discover information across the enterprise. The vendor also announced NetBackup 5000 deduplication appliance and cloud storage for NetBackup and Backup Exec to help organizations reduce their data storage footprints and more effectively leverage cloud-based data storage services.
Posted September 20, 2010
Oracle has introduced Oracle GoldenGate 11g and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition 11g, new releases of the two products that form the foundation of Oracle's data integration product line. The new products, part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family, offer tighter integration with Oracle applications and technologies, support for additional heterogeneous systems, and improved performance.
Posted September 15, 2010
Enhancing its portfolio of desktop virtualization solutions, Oracle has announced Oracle Secure Global Desktop 4.6, a solution that delivers server-hosted applications and desktops to client devices, enabling businesses to manage applications centrally in the data center, resulting in higher security, decreased operational costs, and increased mobility.
Posted September 15, 2010
Idera, a provider of Microsoft SQL Server management and administration solutions, has announced the public beta of Idera SQL doctor 1.1, a new tool for database administrators (DBAs) and database developers that collects SQL Server configuration and run-time information, analyzes the results, pinpoints problems, and provides immediate prioritized recommendations to resolve identified SQL Server performance problems.
Posted September 14, 2010
Fewer than 30% of the 430 respondents to a new survey conducted by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) say their organizations are encrypting personally identifiable information in all their databases. Although that percentage is up slightly from last year, the finding is surprising given the number of existing data privacy and protection mandates that specifically call for data-at-rest encryption.
Posted September 09, 2010
The promises of public cloud computing - pay as you go, infinite scale and outsourced administration - are compelling. However, for most enterprises, security, geography and risk mitigation concerns make private cloud platforms more desirable. Enterprise customers like the idea of on-demand provisioning, but are often unwilling to take the performance, security and risk drawbacks of moving applications to remote hardware that is not under their direct control.
Posted September 07, 2010
Oracle is a fast-changing company, and in recent years, its pace has accelerated to blinding speed. The software giant has expanded well beyond its relational database roots to encompass applications, management tools, service-oriented architecture and middleware, and even hardware. There are now many components to Oracle - from three major databases, to enterprise resource applications, to web applications to development languages to open source desktop tools.
Posted September 07, 2010
Brent Ozar achieved SQL Server 2008 Master status earlier this year, becoming the fifth person in the U.S. outside of Microsoft to achieve the company's highest technical certification. A Quest Software SQL Server expert at the time, Ozar has since joined SQLskills.com, a provider of training and consulting focused on Microsoft SQL Server, as a principal consulting partner. In this issue, he provides an arcane gliimpse into the intense 3-week-long onsite program that include the most difficult exams he had ever seen.
Posted September 07, 2010
As databases are established, particularly databases intended to support analytics initiatives, responsibilities for the design must include articulating the planned approaches for enhancing and scaling the database over time. If a database is created to express a multidimensional data warehouse bus architecture, or a corporate information factory, or anything else, the explanation of this connection should exist somewhere. Such documentation should also expand on why things were decided as they were and the expected stylings to be associated with proposed enhancements. Descriptions involving anticipated processing patterns extend naturally from such architecture artifacts. Database and application design personnel should work together in the creation of such credentials to ensure these documents thoroughly cover the needs of the personnel involved in building and maintaining the solution.
Posted September 07, 2010
It's almost hard to believe I've been your columnist for Microsoft SQL Server topics for more than 5 years! As an analyst of Microsoft SQL Server, as well as one who's interested in the whole spectrum of database systems, I've tried to provide insight for the questions of "how" and "why" Microsoft has made the choices it has in crafting SQL Server. After all, understanding the context and motivation for a particular set of features-or a particular marketing strategy-can help you fully understand the best choices for your own internal IT strategies and projects.
Posted September 07, 2010
Database systems require data files to store the data under management. These files, or data sets, reside on storage media. So storage management should be a key part of the database operations required of a database administrator (DBA). Unfortunately, storage is sometimes relegated to an afterthought; after all, don't we have storage administrators who deal with our disk arrays? But this way of thinking is misguided. To succeed, database administration and storage administration need to cooperate and work together.
Posted September 07, 2010
Interest in and adoption of open source databases continues to dramatically increase. This truth was recently underscored for me when I sat down with one of the top industry analysts who covers the database market. Among the many interesting data points we discussed were the fact that his company has seen a 50% increase in open source database inquiries in the past 18 months and that more than 80% of corporations are looking to use open source databases in their infrastructures, including companies in the Fortune 100.
Posted September 07, 2010
Many organizations now have, in their possession, the sophisticated analysis tools and dashboards that connect to back-end systems and enable them to peer deeply into their businesses to assess progress on all fronts-from revenues to stock outs to employee performance. However, a recent survey of 279 Oracle applications managers reveals that when it comes to decision making, simple spreadsheets still remain the tool of choice. And business users still wait days, weeks, and months for their IT departments to deliver reports, despite significant investments in performance management systems.
Posted September 07, 2010
Oracle yesterday announced that Mark V. Hurd has joined Oracle as president and has been named to Oracle's board of directors. Hurd will report to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he'll do even better at Oracle," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, in a statement commenting on Hurd's hire. "There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark. Oracle's future is engineering complete and integrated hardware and software systems for the enterprise. Mark pioneered the integration of hardware with software when Teradata was a part of NCR."
Posted September 07, 2010
Quest Software, Inc. announced today that it has added Apache Cassandra, an open source NoSQL database, to its list of supported NoSQL platforms with the second beta release of Toad for Cloud Databases. Toad now supports data access and management for Apache Cassandra, Amazon SimpleDB, Microsoft Azure Table Services, Apache HBase, and any open database connectivity-enabled relational database.
Posted September 07, 2010
InterSystems Corporation, a leader in software for connected healthcare, has announced that its customer, LifePoint Informatics, has moved its flagship LifePoint InfoHub to the InterSystems Ensemble rapid integration and development platform. InterSystems' application partner LifePoint, based in Glen Rock, N.J., provides outreach business applications and electronic medical record and health information exchange integration. The migration to Ensemble has enabled LifePoint to grow its business an estimated 40% since 2008, according to the company.
Posted September 07, 2010
EnterpriseDB, which provides products, services, support and training based on the PostgreSQL open source database project, has received a strategic investment from KT (formerly Korea Telecom) and has accepted venture capital funding from new investment partner TransLink Capital. EnterpriseDB says the new funding will enable it to expand its product and marketing operations to capitalize on the upheaval in the database market caused by consolidation and an enterprise platform shift to virtualized and cloud infrastructure.
Posted September 07, 2010
MarkLogic Corporation has announced that MarkLogic Server has earned Common Criteria Certification from an unbiased independent evaluator. MarkLogic Server has been validated in accordance with the provisions of the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) Common Criteria Evaluation and Validation Scheme (CCEVS) for IT Security, an IT security certification program.
Posted September 07, 2010
Mythics, Inc. has announced that it has been awarded a letter of supply to resell the Oracle Exadata platform from Oracle. Mythics is an Oracle PartnerNetwork Platinum Partner, Oracle GSA Schedule Holder (GS-35F-0153M), and Oracle Value Added Reseller (VAR). The letter of supply will allow Mythics to sell the Oracle Exadata platform via their own GSA Schedule contract.
Posted September 02, 2010
Oracle has announced a full line-up of partner events and activities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 in San Francisco. The week kicks off with the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Forum, and will be followed by a series of Partner Pavilions and partner-only sessions, throughout the conference that will allow partners to share successes, showcase solutions and capabilities, increase customer and prospect visibility, and learn about new opportunities for business growth with Oracle.
Posted September 02, 2010
Oracle recently hosted a 6-hour online forum to showcase its strategy for virtualization. Oracle's Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, and John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, kicked off the agenda of analyst, customer and product webcasts, by explaining how Oracle delivers a complete virtualization offering, all the way from desktop through the data center and why that approach provides more customer benefits than point solutions.
Posted September 02, 2010
The Rocket U2 Denver team is moving its offices. According to the company, customers should see minimal-to-no disruption in service during the relocation, as the U2BC system and U2 websites are hosted at another Rocket site. Starting Monday, August 30, the new address will be 4600 S. Ulster Street, Suite 1100, Denver, Colo., 80237. All phone numbers and email addresses remain the same.
Posted August 25, 2010
Entrinsik has announced that, at the recommendation of its solution provider, Progenixx, the Everett Housing Authority (EHA) has selected Entrinsik's Informer Web Reporting software. For over 60 years, EHA has served the housing needs of the people of Everett, Wash. Critical to supporting this commitment is the ability to provide its staff across four departments with information that is up-to-the-minute and easily accessible in order to optimize decision making without burdening IT with numerous custom report requests.
Posted August 25, 2010
The latest version of Sybase Unwired Platform, 1.5.2, that will enable enterprise developers to simply and quickly build applications that connect business data from more sources, including SAP applications, to mobile workers on any device, is now available.
Posted August 25, 2010
Sybase, Inc., an SAP company, recently announced the continued growth of the Sybase(R) IQ partner ecosystem. Through key relationships with companies such as Bradmark Technologies, Fuzzy Logix, ISYS Search Software, Kapow Technologies, SAS, Tableau Software, and Zend Technologies, Sybase IQ analytics server continues to support the demanding analytics environments of its more than 1,800 customers and 3,200 installs worldwide.
Posted August 25, 2010
At an event last week co-located in Boston and Frankfurt, company leaders from SAP AG and Sybase came together for the first time to share the strategy and joint product direction for the newly combined companies. SAP confirmed that Sybase will be run as a separate, independent unit - and that customer investments in Sybase products will be preserved and supported.
Posted August 24, 2010
Idera, a provider of Microsoft SQL Server management and administration solutions, has announced Idera SQL admin toolset 1.5, a set of 25 desktop tools for monitoring, troubleshooting, administering and reporting on SQL Server.
Posted August 24, 2010
Canonical Ltd., the company behind Ubuntu, has launched a virtual appliance of IBM's DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform in private and public cloud configurations. Canonical also announced that IBM has completed validation of the full version of DB2 software on Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support Server Edition.
Posted August 18, 2010
Furthering its commitment to desktop virtualization, Oracle announced the newly released Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3.2. Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a complete management, hosting and access solution for virtualized desktops hosted in the data center. By enabling standardized virtual desktop images, Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure helps reduce administration overhead, lover total cost of ownership and increase security.
Posted August 18, 2010
Oracle Database 11g Standard Edition One has delivered a world record price/performance result with the TPC-C benchmark, Oracle announced. Oracle Database 11g Standard Edition One running on an HP ProLiant ML350 G6 server with a single six-core Intel Xeon X5650 2.67 GHz processor with Oracle Enterprise Linux set a world record TPC-C price/performance result of $0.39/tpmC with a performance result of 290,040 tpmC.
Posted August 18, 2010
As part of its Power announcements yesterday, IBM introduced IBM Rational Power Appliance, a family of software appliances comprised of Power Express servers that are pre-loaded and pre-configured with IBM Rational software for AIX development. Available in a range of sizes and programming languages to suit specific user requirements, these ready-to-use systems provide customers a fully-enabled software development environment that can be put to use in a matter of hours.
Posted August 18, 2010