DBTA E-EDITION
April 2020
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Trends and Applications
We live in a business world that craves instantaneous response times, especially in terms of the responsiveness of modern transactional applications. Customers expect to make a money transfer, pay a bill, or buy a product online in a matter of seconds. This insatiable desire for speed to customer parallels the need to increase speed to market for these modern apps. With development activity accelerating through DevOps, do we ever stop to consider the increased demands this is putting on batch processing?
When it comes to DevOps, developers increasingly recognize databases to be code sets that require ongoing integration and deployment. They are "another code deployment which can and should be managed, tested, automated, and improved with the same robust, reliable methodologies applied to application code," according to the authors of a recent survey of 2,000 developers.
The hype around DevOps and its potential to drive greater ROI across a wide range of enterprise operations increased substantially in the last decade. However, as these expectations carry into 2020, organizations will start to take a more sober approach to DevOps implementations. While DevOps was initially seen as a widespread solution to all sorts of enterprise IT issues, the implementation of DevOps approaches is now shaping up to become more strategic and focused, with much of the emphasis on how to maximize the ultimate return on investment.
Cutting-edge startups are constantly emerging to address new challenges and problems in ways never thought possible. Many of these young, innovative companies have fresh approaches that tap into blockchain, quantum computing, advanced analytics, AI, DevOps methodologies, containerization, and data security advancements. To shine a spotlight on some of the ways innovation in IT is being reflected today, here, DBTA presents 28 companies we think are worth watching in 2020.
To get a full appreciation for the incredible pace of change in business technology, look at the past 6 years. In 2014, IDC published a report that said that, by 2020, the digital universe would contain nearly as many digital bits as there are stars in the universe, and the data we create and copy annually would reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes. Guess what? It's 2020. And it turns out IDC was correct in assuming that we were about to endure a data deluge.
DevOps, DataOps, AI, and containers all lead to one important innovation for enterprises seeking to be more data-driven—and that is greater automation. Data-driven enterprises cannot function if data resources and applications are in any way being manually administered, deployed, remediated, or upgraded.
With $3.6 trillion in mergers and acquisitions completed in 2019 alone, M&A activity has been booming. However, a merger or acquisition isn't just a business decision and a business process. It's also a massive undertaking on the IT side, as you figure out how to migrate and integrate business applications and business data.
Columns - Database Elaborations
As we have moved forward with APIs and microservices, every organization has even more data stores to manage and more sources of data to consider. Sorting through data structures for operational solutions can become mind-numbing due to the variety, or even frustrating due to a lack of detail from many vendors. Source systems are no longer the monoliths they once were.
Columns - DBA Corner
Modern software development teams have adopted a continuous delivery approach based upon DevOps and agile development techniques. The small and frequent code changes that result from such methodologies can deliver significant benefit in terms of reduced lead time for changes, a lower failure rate, and a reduced mean time to recovery when errors are encountered. Indeed, today's developers migrate more frequent changes into the production environment than ever before.
Columns - Quest IOUG Database & Technology Insights
At Oracle OpenWorld 2019, Oracle introduced the Cloud Free Tier with Always Free services so anyone can try the world's first self-driving database and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for an unlimited time. It provides customers with the opportunity to build, learn, and explore the full functionality of Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, including Compute VMs, Block and Object Storage, and Load Balancer.
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
I've kept you informed over the years about not just the latest news and features in SQL Server, but across the entire Microsoft Data Platform, both on-premise and in the cloud. This includes additional products such as SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), and their cloud siblings, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory (ADF). Another important and powerful sibling product is Azure Cosmos DB, previously known as Document DB, which I first wrote about here many years ago.
Columns - Next-Gen Data Management
Even before the IT elements of data optimization begin, aligning organizational culture around a data-driven mindset will be a major challenge. Making the case for data optimization is important. Even before the IT elements of data optimization begin, aligning organizational culture around a data-driven mindset will be a major challenge. Making the case for data optimization is important.
Columns - Emerging Technologies
In the HBO series "Silicon Valley," Pied Piper CEO Richard Hendricks attempted to return power to the people by creating a peer-to-peer "new internet" in which data and communications are distributed across all the devices on the network with no central point of control. In the real world, several technology companies are trying to do the same thing, and blockchain is the critical enabling technology. Elastos is one of these next-generation blockchain projects.