Database Management Articles
Confio Software released version 8.3 of its Ignite database performance monitoring software at COLLABORATE 13 this week. Ignite 8.3 enhancements were developed specifically to address the needs of DBAs with very large database deployments spread out geographically as well as enterprise-level requirements for security and compliance, Don Bergal, chief marketing officer of Confio, tells DBTA.
Posted April 25, 2013
Memory-based storage system provider Violin Memory Inc. and SAP AG have announced that Violin 6000 Series Flash Memory Arrays are now certified for interoperability with SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP Sybase ASE), providing reliability and increased performance across a range of enterprise applications. Together, these solutions will provide enhanced and simplified solutions that leverage the power of Violin Flash Memory Arrays and business-critical SAP applications to accelerate transaction-driven environments.
Posted April 24, 2013
Continuent, Inc., a provider of clustering and replication solutions , has announced the availability of completely open-sourced Tungsten Replicator 2.1. This release includes previously closed-source capabilities to extract data in real time from Oracle EE and SE servers, including RAC.
Posted April 22, 2013
"Big data" and the impact of analytics on large quantities of data is a persistent meme in today's Information Technology market. One of the big questions looming in IT departments about big data is what, exactly, does it mean in terms of management and administration. Will traditional data management concepts such as data modeling, database administration, data quality, data governance, and data stewardship apply in the new age of big data? According to analysts at Wikibon, big data refers to datasets whose size, type and speed of creation make it impractical to process and analyze with traditional tools . So, given that definition, it would seem that traditional concepts are at the very least "impractical," right?
Posted April 10, 2013
Oracle announced the availability of the Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 Starter Rack and Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 In-Rack Expansion. The new Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 Starter Rack is intended to help customers jump start their first big data projects and the new Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 In-Rack Expansion is aimed at helping them cost-effectively scale the system as their data grows. In addition, the Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 (Full Rack configuration) is now available through Oracle Infrastructure as a Service.
Posted April 10, 2013
GenieDB, a provider of distributed relational database technology, has announced the availability of its "Worldwide Database" in the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace. GenieDB works alongside standard MySQL to provide a cloud-enabled platform, distributed across multiple geographies and clouds, and delivering high availability and local performance levels to users anywhere in the world.
Posted April 09, 2013
New technologies designed to help companies and governments tackle big data have been unveiled by IBM. The new technologies include the new IBM PureData System for Hadoop, designed to make it easier and faster to deploy Hadoop in the enterprise, and "BLU Acceleration," which is aimed at improving analytical performance in data management systems.
Posted April 05, 2013
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced a complete refresh of Oracle's midrange and high-end SPARC server lines. Unveiled during a live webcast, the new SPARC T5 and M5 servers join the SPARC T4 servers to complete Oracle's SPARC family, spanning entry-level, midrange and high-end.
Posted April 02, 2013
The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) will celebrate its 20th anniversary at COLLABORATE 13, a conference on Oracle technology presented jointly by the IOUG, OAUG (Oracle Applications User Group) and the Quest International User Group. The event will be held April 7 to 11 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. As part of the conference, the IOUG will host the COLLABORATE 13-IOUG Forum with nearly 1,000 sessions providing user-driven content. The theme of this year's COLLABORATE 13-IOUG Forum is "Elevate - take control of your career and elevate your Oracle ecosystem knowledge and expertise," says IOUG president John Matelski.
Posted March 27, 2013
Embarcadero Technologies, a provider of software solutions for application and database development, has introduced DB PowerStudio XE3.5, the latest release of the company's database management and development platform. DB PowerStudio XE3.5 is a key component of Embarcadero's new metadata governance platform, which allows organizations to leverage diverse data across information management and the software development lifecycle for data governance initiatives.
Posted March 27, 2013
Two big questions are on the minds of data professionals these days. How are increasing complexity and the inevitable onslaught of big data shaping the future of database administrators and data architects? How will our roles change? In the interest of studying the evolving landscape of data, the Independent Oracle User's Group (IOUG) took the pulse of the community. The Big Data Skills for Success study polled numerous individuals in the IOUG Oracle technology community, to identify just how the responsibilities of handling data are changing and what the future of these roles looks like.
Posted March 27, 2013
When data professionals think about regulatory compliance we tend to consider only data in our production databases. After all, it is this data that runs our business and that must be protected. So we work to implement database auditing to know who did what to which data when; or we tackle database security and data protection initiatives to protect our data from prying eyes; or we focus on improving data quality to ensure the accuracy of our processes.
Posted March 27, 2013
Application Security, Inc., a provider of enterprise database security solutions, has released a new, built-in policy for FedRAMP in the SHATTER Knowledgebase KB 4.25 release. This will provide cloud service providers with a simplified process to become part of the Federal Risk and Authorization Program (FedRAMP).
Posted March 26, 2013
Two columns ago, I described how the TPC benchmarks are useful for getting a general idea of the performance characteristics of your preferred database vendor and hardware platform. And in last month's column, I described how the published TPC benchmarks can even help with pricing, especially when you don't have your own quantity discounts in place.
Posted March 19, 2013
Databases are restricted by reliance on disk-based storage, a technology that has been in place for several decades. Even with the addition of memory caches and solid state drives, the model of relying on repeated access to information storage devices remains a hindrance in capitalizing on today's "big data," according to 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 Corp. and conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc.
Posted March 14, 2013
Showing that there's more to the real-time SAP HANA platform than just business, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and SAP announced they have worked together to launch NBA.com/Stats, a new statistical destination on NBA.com giving fans interactive access to official NBA statistics and analysis.
Posted March 12, 2013
For the second year, Percona, a provider of professional services for MySQL, will host the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. This year's conference will take place April 22 to April 25 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara & The Santa Clara Convention Center.
Posted March 11, 2013
Oracle has announced the general availability of Oracle Database Appliance X3-2, featuring up to twice the performance and supporting over four times the storage as compared to the original Oracle Database Appliance. Oracle Database Appliance is a complete package of software, server, storage and networking designed for simplicity and high availability, helping businesses of all sizes reduce risk and save time and money managing their data and applications.
Posted March 06, 2013
Rackspace Hosting has acquired ObjectRocket, a MongoDB database as a service (DBaaS) provider. Through the acquisition, Rackspace says it will broaden its OpenStack-based open cloud platform to provide a NoSQL DBaaS, and establish a strong presence within the high-growth NoSQL database market.
Posted March 04, 2013
The continued expansion of structured and unstructured data storage seems to be never-ending. At the same time, database administrators' need to reduce their storage consumption is accelerating as its cost becomes more visible. Today, however, there are data optimization technologies available that can help with the continued data growth.
Posted February 27, 2013
DataCore Software, a provider of storage virtualization software, has made enhancements to its SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor. The new capabilities are intended to support customers who are facing high data growth, as well as the need to enable faster response times and provide continuous availability for business-critical applications.
Posted February 27, 2013
Oracle president Mark Hurd and Oracle executive vice president of product development Thomas Kurian recently hosted a conference call to provide an update on Oracle's cloud strategy and recap of product-related developments. Oracle is trying to do two things for customers - simplify their IT and power their innovation, said Hurd.
Posted February 27, 2013
SAP has announced two new number-one results on the SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark for SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE).
Posted February 27, 2013
SAP and NetApp say they are tightening their collaboration with the goal of better supporting solutions such as SAP's HANA platform and SAP's NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management software. According to the companies, by complementing database solutions from SAP with NetApp storage and data management solutions, they can provide customers an agile data infrastructure for SAP applications that can help them be more competitive and reduce cost of ownership.
Posted February 27, 2013
Oracle has added a new utility to its storage software portfolio that is designed to streamline and automate critical tasks for customers using Oracle Database with Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliance.
Posted February 20, 2013
Expanding its cloud portfolio, Oracle has unveiled Oracle Infrastructure as a Service (Oracle IaaS) with "Capacity on Demand." "For the first time, you can get Oracle engineered systems deployed on premise behind your firewall for a monthly fee," said Oracle president Mark Hurd, during a live webcast that presented details of the offering. Announced by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at Oracle OpenWorld in 2012, Oracle IaaS enables organizations to deploy fully integrated engineered systems, including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle SPARC SuperCluster, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance in their data centers.
Posted February 13, 2013
A profound shift is occurring in where data lives. Thanks to skyrocketing demand for real-time access to huge volumes of data—big data—technology architects are increasingly moving data out of slow, disk-bound legacy databases and into large, distributed stores of ultra-fast machine memory. The plummeting price of RAM, along with advanced solutions for managing and monitoring distributed in-memory data, mean there are no longer good excuses to make customers, colleagues, and partners wait the seconds—or sometimes hours—it can take your applications to get data out of disk-bound databases. With in-memory, microseconds are the new seconds.
Posted February 13, 2013
Enterprise developers these days are usually heads down, in the trenches working on in-depth applications using Java or .NET with data stored in SQL Server or Oracle or DB2 databases. But there are other options. One of them is FileMaker, an elegant database system and development platform that can be used to quickly build visually appealing and robust applications that run on Macs, Windows PCs, smartphones, and iPads.
Posted February 13, 2013
Oracle announced the general availability of the MySQL 5.6 open source database. According to Oracle, with this version, users can experience simplified query development and faster execution, better transactional throughput and application availability, flexible NoSQL access, improved replication and enhanced instrumentation.
Posted February 06, 2013
EMC Corporation has updated its appliance-based unified big data analytics offering. The new EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance (DCA) Unified Analytics Platform (UAP) Edition expands the system's analytics capabilities and solution flexibility, achieves performance gains in data loading and scanning, and adds integration with EMC's Isilon scale-out NAS storage for enterprise-class data protection and availability. Within a single appliance, the DCA integrates Greenplum Databases for analytics-optimized SQL, Greenplum HD for Hadoop-based processing as well as Greenplum partner business intelligence, ETL, and analytics applications. The appliances have been able to host both a relational database and Hadoop for some time now, Bill Jacobs director of product marketing for EMC Greenplum, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The significance of this launch is that we tightened that integration up even more. We make those two components directly manageable with a single administrative interface and also tighten up the security. All of that is targeted at giving enterprise customers what they need in order to use Hadoop in very mission-critical applications without having to build it all up in Hadoop themselves."
Posted January 31, 2013
SAP announced a new option for SAP Business Suite customers — SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA — providing an integrated family of business applications that captures and analyzes transactional data in real time on a single in-memory platform. With Business Suite on HANA, "SAP has reinvented the software that reinvented businesses," stated Rob Enslin, member of the Global Executive Board and SAP head of sales, as part of his presentation during the company's recent launch event.
Posted January 30, 2013
Each new year, this column looks back over the most significant data and database-related events of the previous year. Keeping in mind that this column is written before the year is over (in November 2012) to meet publication deadlines, let's dive into the year that was in data.
Posted January 30, 2013
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, has announced the release of Attunity RepliWeb for Enterprise File Replication (EFR) 6.0, which is designed to allow organizations to quickly and easily replicate data files to and from Apache Hadoop. According to Attunity, the ability to move large amounts of data in and out of Hadoop is especially beneficial to industries that need to process big data on a regular basis such as e-commerce, healthcare, infrastructure management and mobile.
Posted January 29, 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
VoltDB has announced the immediate availability of the newest version of its flagship offering, VoltDB 3.0. VoltDB is an in-memory relational database that aims to address a common problem for enterprises - the ability to build applications that can ingest, analyze and act on massive volumes of data fast enough to deliver business value. According to Bruce Reading, CEO and president of VoltDB, in order for big data to achieve its full value, developers must be able to solve the data velocity problem.
Posted January 22, 2013
Let's talk about database application benchmarking. This is a skill set which, in my opinion, is one of the major differentiators between a journeyman-level DBA and a true master of the trade. In this article, I'll be giving you a brief introduction to TPC benchmarks and, in future articles, I'll be telling you how to extract specific tidbits of very valuable information from the published benchmark results. But let's get started with an overview.
Posted January 22, 2013
Micro Focus, a provider of modernization solutions, launched new interfaces that are designed to enable organizations to more quickly modernize the end user experience in isolation from the application code. The new products, RUMBA 9.0 and RUMBA+, help transpose green-screen presentations onto more familiar Windows, mobile, and web environments. "With wider reaching deployment capabilities, end user productivity improvement is quickly delivered through a simple point and click interface," says Kevin Brearley, senior director of product management for Micro Focus.
Posted January 22, 2013