DBTA E-EDITION
December 2019
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Trends and Applications
Clouds and Autonomous Databases are Poised for Growth
The IT industry is going through a major shift from centralized data centers to dispersed deployments across a variety of cloud and on-premise platforms. At the same time, availability is becoming more critical. Recently, Dave Bermingham, technical evangelist of SIOS Technology, shared his views on the current state of high availability in the cloud, and what organizations need to do to ensure continuity of service. "When moving to the cloud, the first thing you will discover is that the traditional SAN-based failover cluster for HA is no longer an option," he noted.
Think about the last time you filled out a paper form and contrast that with how many times you've filled out forms online. We live in an era where everything is digital. Forms are online, every click is captured, and even personal lives are documented on social media. The first wave of digitization led to more BI and better data-driven decisions. But, as we head into 2020, the focus has shifted from BI to operational analytics. Traditional BI was focused on enabling executives to make decisions using historical data. It was accelerated by technologies such as Hadoop, which were built for scale but could not deliver results.
As we stand at the start of a new year and on the precipice of a new decade—the 2020s, DBTA reached out to industry leaders for their perspectives on not only what's ahead in the year 2020 but also what they see developing as the next decade unfolds.
Whether you are reading the news, going to the store, dealing with customer service or sending a package, it has become apparent that AI is becoming part of our daily lives. We can see this on more of a macro level with the automotive industry and its adoption of AI to improve the overall driving experience, as well as the healthcare industry as it uses the technology to automate the process of identifying and ultimately diagnosing high-risk patient groups. Even the agriculture industry is taking advantage of AI to improve operating efficiency and assist with the automation of essential farming processes.
Columns - Database Elaborations
What exactly is a data architecture? As the Zachman Framework exposed long ago, different people look for different kinds of details and documentation to answer fundamental questions about an enterprise's architecture. Someone involved with infrastructure will need to understand the tools used and the methods employed to move data and to be clear on concepts about how security will be enforced. But these aspects are only initial parts of the overall architecture, and as such, a simple diagram of tools used is incomplete and insufficient for a comprehensive view of data architecture.
Columns - DBA Corner
If you have been around the IT industry for as long as I have, you have seen technologies and ideas come and go—and sometimes even come back again. This is surely the case with the "new" products that call themselves data catalogs.
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
The annual PASS Summit, the industry's largest gathering of SQL Server professionals, hosted more than 4,000 attendees in Seattle recently recently. PASS (www.pass.org) has grown to more than 300 local chapters around the world, and its 1,000th SQL Saturday will likely be held sometime in early 2020. The opening keynote by Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president of data and AI at Microsoft, focused on the achievements and growth of SQL Server in the marketplace, as well as on the new features and capabilities now available in the public release of SQL Server 2019.
Columns - Next-Gen Data Management
Remember when standing up a new database instance involved modeling the application using the underlying database to figure out what hardware (server, storage, etc.) was needed to support the new instance? And, since most organizations did capacity planning on a spreadsheet using linear metrics, there was a lot of estimating involved, thus over-provisioning the hardware was standard procedure.
Columns - Emerging Technologies
Researchers at Google recently announced they had achieved "quantum supremacy" by performing a non-trivial computation on a quantum computer that decisively outperformed a "classical" computer performing the same task. Although IBM disputed some details of the achievement, this announcement will probably stand as a milestone in the development of quantum computing technology. In minutes Google's quantum computer performed the calculation that would have taken most traditional computers thousands of years.
MV Community
Zumasys is introducing jBASE 5.7.4, now including object-oriented programming, JSON support, enhanced security, and more. Object and JSON support updates allow users to parse JSON strings into a jBASE, debug applications quicker, and enhance support application with Dynamic Objects.
Pick Cloud and Rocket Software are presenting the third and final part of their Rocket MultiValue Cloud Webinar Series on Tuesday, December 10, at 11:00 a.m. ET/8:00 a.m. PT. Mark Pick CEO (Cloud Evangelist Officer) of Pick Cloud and son of Dick Pick, shares his affordable hosting solution for MultiValue clients and the advantage of Google's infrastructure on their private global fiber network - available on over 75 operating systems, including Microsoft Windows Server and many different Linux distributions.
Zumasys is continuing to see interest in the MultiValue space as its latest endeavor, revealed in the spring, attracts young developers. This past spring, Zumasys introduced a new open website for the PICK MultiValue industry that is designed to help companies train young developers.