DBTA E-EDITION
December 2016
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Trends and Applications
IT operations teams have been furiously preparing for this year's holiday season - the retail industry's busiest time of the year for web traffic. Here is a checklist of the key factors IT operations teams need to consider to ensure their IT infrastructure is ready now - and stays that way throughout the shopping season.
It is not uncommon for a medium-to-large company to have 50 or more different security technologies in place. While fiscally inefficient, this approach has been somewhat effective up to this point in dealing with the types of attacks launched against it. But the threat landscape is currently changing more rapidly than ever, forcing businesses to shift to a more forward-thinking security model.
By now it's well documented that employees will take IT tasks into their own hands when IT cannot give them the support they need, and when they need it. The phenomenon is ubiquitous and persistent, even to the point that it's been dubbed "shadow IT." Gartner recently noted that by 2020, a third of successful attacks experienced by enterprises will be on their shadow IT resources.
New Big Data Sourcebook Examines the Unfolding Big Data Era
Columns - Big Data Notes
It's been amusing to watch the NoSQL movement transition from a "We don't need no stinking SQL" attitude to a "Can I please have some SQL with that?" philosophy. The nonrelational databases that emerged over the past 8 years initially offered no SQL capabilities. However, today we have an embarrassment of SQL options for "NoSQL." Hive offers SQL for Hadoop systems, Spark has SparkSQL, MongoDB has a SQL-based BI connector, and so on.
Columns - Database Elaborations
Terms such as "active," "inactive," and "canceled" may seem mundane and inconsequential, and when folks hear the term,"valid values," their eyes glaze and expectations of interest diminish. But exciting or not, reference values and an understanding of them are important to every organization.
Columns - DBA Corner
The clear trend these days is to automate and enable computerized tasks to streamline and optimize administrative and maintenance tasks. Many database management tasks that today require oversight and handholding by DBAs can, over time, be turned over to intelligently automated software to manage. But automation is just the first step.
Columns - Quest IOUG Database & Technology Insights
In what has become a data-driven world, your organization's data is valuable. It has become the "keys to the kingdom," so to speak. Very few companies today could function without data, especially good data. However, I would suggest that more important than data, is information. Data provides the building blocks, but information is really the consumable outcome that can be used as a competitive edge.
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
If you are a SQL Server professional, but you don't know about the PASS Summit, then you are missing out. The annual conference is convened every fall in downtown Seattle, the backyard of Microsoft, and attracted over 6,000 attendees this year. And, since it's so close to the Microsoft Redmond campus, hundreds of the SQL Server developers and program managers get to attend—answering user questions, delivering sessions, and presenting chalk talks and panel discussions.
Columns - Next-Gen Data Management
There are three big challenges facing today's DBAs—a shift to an application-centric focus, the need to support multiple database platforms, and expanding responsibilities for managing database performance in the cloud as well as on premises.