Database Management Articles
Oracle has unveiled Oracle Airline Data Model, a standards-based, pre-built database schema to help airlines optimize the collection, storage, and analysis of passenger data from reservations, sales, operations, loyalty, customer service and finance in their data warehouse. Available as an option for Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, the new Oracle Airline Data Model delivers a comprehensive database schema for passenger data, sophisticated analytics, trending and data mining capabilities.
Posted March 14, 2012
Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, a high-speed engineered system featuring in-memory business intelligence software and hardware. Oracle Exalytics features a new release of Oracle BI Foundation Suite and Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics enhanced for an Oracle Sun server designed for in-memory analytics. According to Oracle, the interactive real-time analysis enabled by Oracle Exalytics, is intended to enable organizations to maximize profitability, increase revenues and market share, and react more quickly to changing business conditions.
Posted March 14, 2012
Quest Software said it has entered into definitive agreements with affiliates of Insight Venture Partners to become a private company. In the deal, stockholders would receive $23 per share in cash, valuing the company at approximately $2.0 billion. Upon closing, Quest will be a privately held company and will continue to be led by chairman and CEO Vinny Smith and the existing senior management team. "As a private company, we will have increased flexibility to drive innovation across our product lines and execute our long-term strategy," said Smith in a statement released by the company.
Posted March 09, 2012
Schooner Information Technology, Inc., which develops and markets high-performance SQL database software, and Ispirer Systems, a provider of multi-platform database migration solutions, have formed a partnership to facilitate migrations from other databases to SchoonerSQL. "Partnering with Ispirer removes the barrier of complexity from migrations to SchoonerSQL - allowing a broader range of database customers to consider Schooner either for net new deployments or wholesale migrations," says Pavan K. Venkatesh, Schooner information technology director of product management and strategy.
Posted March 09, 2012
MapR Technologies and Informatica have announced joint support for MapR's distribution for Hadoop with the Informatica Platform. In addition, Informatica HParser Community Edition which is available for free will be available for download as part of the MapR distribution from the MapR website. The MapR distribution is also available through the EMC Greenplum MR Edition and Cisco UCS.
Posted March 08, 2012
Continuent, Inc., a provider of replication and clustering solutions for open source databases, and SkySQL Ab, a provider of solutions for the MySQL database in the enterprise and cloud, have announced a strategic partnership. SkySQL will provide its MySQL database software, services and support to customers of Continuent's Tungsten Enterprise, a complete clustering and data management solution for MySQL, and Tungsten Replicator, an advanced data replication solution.
Posted March 08, 2012
Organizational focus has been placed on the emergence of "big data" - large-scale data sets that businesses and governments use to create new value with today's computing and communications power. Big data poses many opportunities, but managing the rapid growth adds challenges, including complexity and cost. Leaders must address the implications of big data, increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the internet.
Posted March 07, 2012
As a DBA, it is almost inevitable that you will change jobs several times during your career. When making a job change, you will obviously consider requirements such as salary, bonus, benefits, frequency of reviews, and amount of vacation time. However, you also should consider how the company "treats" their DBAs. Different organizations place different value on the DBA job. It is imperative to your career development that you scout for progressive organizations that understand the complexity and ongoing learning requirements for the position.
Posted March 07, 2012
For enterprises grappling with the onslaught of big data, a new platform has emerged from the open source world that promises to provide a cost-effective way to store and process petabytes and petabytes worth of information. Hadoop, an Apache project, is already being eagerly embraced by data managers and technologists as a way to manage and analyze mountains of data streaming in from websites and devices. Running data such as weblogs through traditional platforms such as data warehouses or standard analytical toolsets often cannot be cost-justified, as these solutions tend to have high overhead costs. However, organizations are beginning to recognize that such information ultimately can be of tremendous value to the business. Hadoop packages up such data and makes it digestible.
Posted March 07, 2012
Clinical Data Management (CDM) is a company headquartered in Colorado that provides clinical information database software, enabling medical institutions to report and compile data on patient care. A longtime user of Revelation Software, dating back to Revelation G and continuing through OpenInsight, CDM was pleased with both the quality of the products and the service from Revelation. However, CDM had come to realize it needed to provide a web interface for data entry to better support its customers and also stay current with evolving technology requirements. That need was answered when Revelation launched the OpenInsight for Web (O4W) Development Toolkit, a web development toolkit that makes it possible for OpenInsight developers with limited or no HTML, XML or JavaScript experience to develop feature-rich web pages.
Posted March 07, 2012
MarkLogic Corporation has joined the technology partner program of Hortonworks, a leading vendor promoting the development and support of Apache Hadoop. According to the vendors, by leveraging MarkLogic and Hortonworks, organizations will be able to seamlessly combine the power of MapReduce with MarkLogic's real-time, interactive analysis and indexing on a single, unified platform. There are two main reasons that MarkLogic has chosen to partner with Hortonworks, says Justin Makeig, senior product manager at MarkLogic. One is Hortenworks' extensive experience with Hadoop installations and the second is that its core product is 100% open source.
Posted March 06, 2012
Datameer, Inc. has announced a relationship with Microsoft Corporation to support Datameer on the Apache Hadoop-based service on Windows Azure. The new relationship enables Windows Azure users to perform big data analytics with Datameer's BI platform, and Datameer's customers to run and deploy their solutions on Microsoft's Hadoop-based service on Windows Azure.
Posted February 29, 2012
At the Strata Conference today Calpont anounced InfiniDB 3, the latest release of its high performance analytic database. Designed from the ground up for large-scale, high-performance dimensional analytics, predictive analytics, and ad hoc business intelligence, the new release includes capabilities to capitalize on a variety of data structures and deployment variations to meet organizations' need for a flexible and scalable big data architecture.
Posted February 29, 2012
InterSystems Corporation, a provider of software for connected care, announced that LOGICARE Corp. has migrated its top-tier patient instruction software system to the InterSystems Ensemble rapid integration and development platform. The transition is the first phase of a corporate strategy to cut costs and provide seamless connectivity by using Ensemble to handle HL7 messaging for all customer deployments.
Posted February 28, 2012
Varonis Systems Inc., a provider of data governance solutions and metadata framework technology, is set to release a solution with Varonis DatAdvantage, DataPrivilege and IDU Classification Framework and HP IBRIX X9000 Storage Systems in March. The pairing of the Varonis solution with HP IBRIX X9000 will allow for greater visibility into permissions, safe removal of excessive permissions, detailed audit trails of files, data ownership identification, actionable intelligence on the location of sensitive data, and sensitive content analysis.
Posted February 28, 2012
Tableau Software, a provider of business intelligence software, and Cloudera Inc., a provider of Apache Hadoop-based data management software and services, have announced integration between the two companies that provides enterprises with capabilities to more easily extract business insights from their big data without needing the specific technical skills typically required to operate Hadoop. Tableau has developed a Certified Cloudera Connector that is licensed to work with Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH). The new connector is part of the Tableau 7.0 release.
Posted February 24, 2012
Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Advanced Analytics, a new option for Oracle Database 11g that combines Oracle R Enterprise with Oracle Data Mining. According to Oracle, Oracle R Enterprise delivers enterprise class performance for users of the R statistical programming language, increasing the scale of data that can be analyzed by orders of magnitude using Oracle Database 11g.
Posted February 23, 2012
BMMsoft Corporation, a provider of real-time analytic software that automates the storing, integration, management and analysis of big data, has announced the availability of high-speed EDMT 9 for large enterprises, which it says can be deployed instantly and without intensive programming needed by other big data systems. The combination of EDMT 9, Sybase IQ 15.4 and HP Proliant DL 980 Server and cloud, on-premise or hybrid deployment offers the big data functionality to large enterprises that need quick deployment and can't spend time on long development projects, according to Paul Krneta, CTO of BMMsoft.
Posted February 22, 2012
Sybase 365, a subsidiary of Sybase, Inc., has unveiled the 2012 edition of the Sybase Mobile Commerce Guide. "Mobile commerce is reaching a major inflection point," says John Sims, president, Sybase 365. "The developing world has quickly embraced mobile commerce based on a need to access financial services, and the developed world is catching up as regulators start to reform existing banking and transaction rules. Our guide captures practical, real-world depictions of mCommerce in action, which showcases the rapidly growing evolution of commerce within a robust and innovative mobile ecosystem."
Posted February 22, 2012
Like TechWave 2011, TechWave will be co-located with SAP TechEd in 2012. This year's conference will be held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Nev., October 15 to 19.
Posted February 22, 2012
SAP AG has announced two new offerings that will offer the benefits of the SAP HANA platform to small businesses and midsize enterprises (SMEs). With analytics powered by SAP HANA for the SAP Business One application and SAP HANA, Edge edition, SMEs will be able to leverage in-memory technology from SAP. The new offerings from SAP aim to provide SMEs with real-time access to information tailored to their individual requirements.
Posted February 22, 2012
EnterpriseDB, designer of enterprise PostgreSQL and Oracle compatibility products and services, has released the latest version of its Advanced Server platform, Postgres Plus 9.1. The latest update offers improvements in read performance and write scalability, as well as greater flexibility and reliability due to its transaction-level control over synchronous replication, an industry first. Postgres Plus Advanced Server 9.1 is also more secure than previous versions due to the addition of Virtual Private Database, and has expanded its Oracle-compatible features.
Posted February 21, 2012
Objectivity, Inc. has announced the availability of a new version of its graph database - InfiniteGraph 2.1. The release includes three key new features - a new Plug-in Framework, integrated Visualizer, and support for Tinkerpop Blueprints. The new features are designed to allow application developers to get up and running faster, make queries reusable, and receive query results interactively.
Posted February 21, 2012
The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) has announced new programs in the 2012 OAUG Educational Series, a virtual learning series of webinars offered exclusively to OAUG members. "OAUG members consistently report that education is one of the primary reasons for being a member," said Mark Clark, president of the OAUG. "The OAUG Educational Series is a prime example of how our organization continually serves its members by offering informative training events throughout the year to help them reap the most benefit from their Oracle investment."
Posted February 21, 2012
Composite Software has introduced version 6.1 of its Composite Data Virtualization Platform. The new release offers improved caching performance, expanded caching targets, data ship join for Teradata, and Hadoop MapReduce connectivity. Composite 6.1 also provides improvements to the data services development environment with an enhanced data services editor and new publishing options for Representational State Transfer (REST) and Open Data Protocol (OData) data services.
Posted February 17, 2012
At the TDWI 2012 Conference, Jaspersoft, a business intelligence (BI) software provider, announced an upgraded OEM agreement with Talend to include native connectors to Apache Hadoop big data environments in Jaspersoft ETL. With this enhanced ETL offering, Jaspersoft offers CIOs, data scientists, and BI builders the flexibility of three options to harness big data - direct reporting, direct real-time analysis, and batch analysis through ETL data mart access. "Today's data scientists want options to explore data faster," says Karl Van den Bergh, Jaspersoft's vice president of Product and Alliances.
Posted February 16, 2012
Oracle has introduced MySQL Cluster 7.2, which is designed to cost-effectively deliver high availability, high write scalability and low latency for demanding web-based and communications products and services. "The performance and flexibility enhancements in MySQL Cluster 7.2 provide users with a solid foundation for their mission-critical web workloads, blending the best of SQL and NoSQL technologies to reduce risk, cost and complexity," says Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering, Oracle.
Posted February 15, 2012
Lectures related to master data bring forth all sorts of taxonomies intended to help clarify master data and its place within an organization. Sliding scales may be presented: at the top, not master data; at the bottom, very much master data; in the middle, increasing degrees of "master data-ness." For the longest of times everyone thought metadata was confusing enough ... oops, we've done it again. And, we have accomplished the establishment of this master data semantic monster in quite a grand fashion.
Posted February 15, 2012
Today's organizations must capture, track, analyze and store more information than ever before - everything from mass quantities of transactional, online and mobile data, to growing amounts of "machine-generated data" such as call detail records, gaming data or sensor readings. And just as volumes are expanding into the tens of terabytes, and even the petabyte range and beyond, IT departments are facing increasing demands for real-time analytics. In this era of "big data," the challenges are as varied as the solutions available to address them. How can businesses store all their data? How can they mitigate the impact of data overload on application performance, speed and reliability? How can they manage and analyze large data sets both efficiently and cost effectively?
Posted February 09, 2012
Many types of data change over time, and different users and applications have requirements to access data at different points in time. A traditional DBMS stores data that is implied to be valid at the current point-in-time, it does not track the past or future states of the data. For some, the current, up-to-date values for the data are sufficient. But for others, accessing earlier versions of the data is needed. Temporal support makes it possible to store different database states and to query the data "as of" those different states.
Posted February 09, 2012
InterSystems Corporation, a provider of advanced database, integration and analytics technologies, announced it has become ISO 9001:2008 certified. ISO 9001:2008 is a quality management standard, and for InterSystems, the certification covers all processes related to the product and service creation associated with the InterSystems CACHÉ high-performance database and InterSystems Ensemble integration and development platform that are performed or managed from InterSystems' Cambridge-based headquarters.
Posted February 09, 2012
Ntirety, Inc. announced that it has been successfully audited and certified under the MSPAlliance's (MSPA) Unified Certification Standard for Cloud and Managed Service Providers (UCS). The certification is specifically designed to provide business consumers of cloud and managed services with the assurance that the service provider they hire will meet or exceed the highest principles of quality in areas such as financial stability, facilities, managed services practices, and customer satisfaction.
Posted February 07, 2012
KXEN, a provider of predictive analytics for business users, has certified its flagship product, InfiniteInsight, for Sybase IQ v.15, the column-based analytics server. The combination of the two solutions allows businesses to gain speed and performance in building predictive models and social network analysis to support business decisions.
Posted January 25, 2012
Star Analytics, Inc., a provider of application process automation and integration software, has released the latest version of its data bridging technology, Star Integration Server, which is intended to make it easy to extract and combine data from Oracle systems with other business intelligence (BI) applications and data warehouses.
Posted January 24, 2012
HiT Software, Inc. has announced a new release of its JDBC/DB2 type 4 SQL middleware, which conforms to the Java JDBC 4.1 specification. With this latest release, application developers can take advantage of added support for additional data types, improved security mechanisms and support for IBM DB2 on a wide range of systems and platforms.
Posted January 23, 2012
"Big data" and analytics have become the rage within the executive suite. The promise is immense - harness all the available information within the enterprise, regardless of data model or source, and mine it for insights that can't be seen any other way. In short, senior managers become more effective at business planning, spotting emerging trends and opportunities and anticipating crises because they have the means to see both the metaphorical trees and the forest at the same time. However, big data technologies don't come without a cost.
Posted January 11, 2012
Let's tie together the last several columns on "2012 Might Really be The End of the World." In this series, I discussed several megatrends in the general IT industry that will have a tremendous impact on the database administration (DBA) profession. The megatrends include both software-related (virtualization and cheap cloud database services) and hardware-related (SSDs and massively multi-core CPUs). These technologies have the potential to obviate many of the core competencies of the DBA, with the first two eliminating or lessening the need for server and hardware configuration and provisioning, and the last two diminishing the need for IO tuning and query tuning, respectively. But those are trends that will take years to reach fruition. What about the near future?
Posted January 11, 2012
Along with thousands of IT professionals, I was in the San Francisco Moscone Center main hall last October listening to Larry Ellison's 2011 Oracle Open world keynote. Larry can always be relied upon to give an entertaining presentation, a unique blend of both technology insights and amusingly disparaging remarks about competitors.
Posted January 11, 2012
Retaining the particulars of change over time is a fairly intricate configuration. Audit log or shadow tables are sometimes employed, but on occasion there is a need for the "old" and "new" rows to exist in a single operation table for application use. Far too often, the implementation of temporal data structures is shoddy, loose, and imprecise; rather than the fairly complex dance move such temporal arrangements must perform in actuality. The sub-optimal result is much like one's performance of the Funky Chicken at a friend's wedding; the desired moves are mimicked, after a fashion, but it is unlikely to earn high marks on "So You Think You Can Dance." The usual temporal implementation simply slaps on start and stop dates, debates a little over default date values versus NULLs, then moves on to the next subject.
Posted January 11, 2012
At the outset of each new year, I devote an edition of my column to review the significant data and database-related events of the previous year. Of course, to meet my deadlines, the column is written before the year is over (this column is being written in November 2011), so please excuse any significant news that may have happened late in December.
Posted January 11, 2012
The latest version of expressor software's flagship data integration platform, expressor 3.5, features cloud integration with Melissa Data's Data Quality Tools and Salesforce.com to provide comprehensive BI reporting and CRM integration with on premises applications. The new Salesforce.com and Melissa Data capabilities ship with expressor 3.5 Desktop Edition and Standard Edition.
Posted January 10, 2012
ScaleBase, Inc. has announced the results of its database benchmark test. ScaleBase has achieved 180,000 Transactions per Minute - the highest result for a MySQL database - while running on an Amazon RDS environment. According to the company, the ScaleBase Load Balancer solution proved how well it can scale MySQL, by running a DBT-2 benchmark, which is similar to the standard TPC-C benchmark, on the Amazon EC2 platform with the Amazon RDS database.
Posted January 10, 2012
Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3, a C, C++, and Fortran development platform for building fast, scalable enterprise applications for Oracle Solaris systems. According to Oracle, the new release accelerates performance of SPARC T4 and x86-based applications up to 300% by leveraging Oracle's advanced compiler technology.
Posted January 04, 2012