DBTA E-EDITION
December 2010
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Trends and Applications
The year 2010 brought many new challenges and opportunities to data managers' jobs everywhere. Companies, still recovering from a savage recession, increasingly turned to the power of analytics to turn data stores into actionable insights, and hopefully gain an edge over less data-savvy competitors. At the same time, data managers and administrators alike found themselves tasked with managing and maintaining the integrity of rapidly multiplying volumes of data, often presented in a dizzying array of formats and structures. New tools and approaches were sought; and the market churning with promising new offerings embracing virtualization, consolidation and information lifecycle management. Where will this lead in the year ahead? Can we expect an acceleration of these initiatives and more? DBTA looked at new industry research, and spoke with leading experts in the data management space, to identify the top trends for 2011.
These days, many companies recognize that there are severe repercussions to ignoring or undervaluing data security, and a sizable segment of organizations-at least one-third in many cases-have been taking additional measures to bolster their data security.
One common challenge I have observed during ITIL service catalog implementations pertains to the handling of out-of-band requests. That is, how should one manage a request for a service that is not in the catalog?
When Data Virtualization?
Columns - Notes on NoSQL
Because any database that does not support the SQL language is, by definition, a "NoSQL" database, some very different databases coexist under the NoSQL banner. Massively scalable data stores like Cassandra, Voldemort, and HBase sacrifice structure to achieve scale-out performance. However, the document-oriented NoSQL databases have very different architectures and objectives.
Columns - Database Elaborations
How does one know what one doesn't know? When evaluating what one knows, it is hard to know where to begin. The wise men say, "The more you know, the more you know you don't know." If one believes such commentary, what is known constitutes the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Databases have an easier time with such missing circumstances. If the rows of a database table are lacking referents, an outer join query filtering for NULLs might detail for you all the missing items. In developing and delivering projects, such a reference list for our minds to link to does not exist, for an outer join or anything else. Often, we do not know everything that needs to be done, particularly as a project starts. The difference between success and failure is not so much what one knows, but in how one handles the gaps between what is known now and what needs to be known before one finishes.
Columns - The Open DBA
Fifty percent of enterprises are now using open source databases in a production environment, according to Forrester Research.This is a multi-digit jump from data available just a few years ago. And this isn't just one or two particular business verticals either; just about every sector of the economy is deploying open source databases in production now. Moreover, Forrester predicts that by 2014, 75% of all businesses will be using open source databases to power their key applications.
Columns - DBA Corner
Assuring optimal performance of database applications starts with coding properly formulated SQL. Poorly written SQL and application code is the cause of most performance problems. As much as 75% of poor relational performance is caused by "bad" SQL and application code. But writing efficient SQL statements can be tricky. This is especially so for programmers new to a relational database environment or those who have never been trained to properly write SQL.
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
SQL Azure is Microsoft's cloud-based relational database service hosted in their data centers, and it's got some DBAs worrying about the future. The more I look at the technology, however, the more I see practical applications for it and the less I think people should be concerned.
MV Community
As Revelation Software completes its internal testing of OpenInsight 9.2.1, the company is inviting any member of its WORKS subscription program to participate in beta testing. OpenInsight 9.2.1 includes numerous new features, enhancements and fixes in a range of categories, including Basic +; OIPI.net/OIPI; Form Designer; System Editor ++; Source Code Management (SCM); TCL; Arev32; Character To OpenInsight (CTO); OpenInsight for Web (O4W); and OpenInsight for U2.
Onsystex, which helps companies extend the reach and effectiveness of MultiValue applications, has announced the appointment of Ian Sandler as director of professional services.
Kore Technologies has announced Release 3.0 of Kourier Integrator for U2, Kore's enterprise integration suite which provides extract, transform, and load (ETL) and enterprise application integration (EAI) capabilities for connecting UniData/UniVerse (U2) applications to Microsoft SQL Server and other best-in-class applications.
The fourth annual U2 University conference was held last month in Denver, providing 3 days of hands-on instruction covering the latest best practices in the database and servers industry. "Attendance was up by at least 30% over last year, so we were bursting at the seams at the Warwick hotel in Denver," Susie Siegesmund, vice president and general manager, Rocket U2, tells DBTA.