DBTA E-EDITION
February 2017
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Trends and Applications
Are enterprises more or less secure than 5 years ago? That's the big question of the moment, especially with ongoing revelations about state-sponsored hacking, as well as an unending stream of reports about customer and employee data being compromised by even the most seemingly security-conscious organizations. Awareness of data security is running at a fever pitch at the highest levels of government and business organizations. There have been plenty of technology advances, and awareness has grown. Still, the wave of breaches and threats never seems to abate, and likely never will.
As businesses realize the importance of big data, adoption is on the rise. But big data is still not in full-scale production everywhere, and many companies say operational challenges hold them back. So what are the operational challenges that big data presents? It's a confluence of three key features of big data.
Columns - Database Elaborations
At one of my very first jobs in the service industry, I had a boss who had a variation on an old adage. He would say, "The customer is not always right. In fact many times the customer is dead wrong; but the customer is always the customer." In a similar way, in data modeling, business users and internal IT users, make the world go around. If they don't use the models that are designed, or worse, if they cannot relate to the designed data models, then what value has been delivered?
Columns - DBA Corner
The role of the DBA is growing and becoming more complicated in the age of digital transformation. As the amount and type of information we store expands, DBAs must become versed in administering not just one type of DBMS (e.g., relational), but multiple types (document, key/value, wide column stores, and graph) and even non-DBMS data platforms (e.g., Hadoop). Furthermore, cloud computing can change the manner in which existing applications and databases operate.
Columns - Quest IOUG Database & Technology Insights
Innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, robotics, and IoT, have had, and will continue to have, broad impact that we don't yet fully understand. Organizations that adopt these technologies will require new business models and processes. We will need to understand who our customers are and what they expect. The world of work as we know it today will continue to evolve at a faster pace—this is why adaptability and resilience are critical to a vibrant career.
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
There's a very handy new tool from Microsoft called the Database Experimentation Assistant (DEA). The DEA makes it very easy to conduct A/B testing for SQL Server upgrades, providing quantitative insight into the performance differences across two versions of a database workload on SQL Server.
Columns - Next-Gen Data Management
There are many points in life where you may ask yourself whether it is better to build or buy. Think of a new house, a business, or an application. Regardless of the object of discussion, answering certain upfront questions can act as a guide to help you along the path to the right solution. Given the increasing importance, complexity, and breadth of database systems, the question of whether to build or to buy database monitoring is an important one to consider.
Columns - Emerging Technologies
Imagine you are standing by a railway track near a lever that switches between two sets of tracks. A runaway rail trolley is heading toward the fork in the tracks, and five people are trapped on the currently activated line. You could switch the trolley to the alternative track, but there is a single person trapped there as well. Do you switch the trolley? The artificial intelligence community is increasingly wrestling with similar moral conundrums implicit in the ever-more pervasive algorithms that underlie much of our technological infrastructure.
MV Community
As Entrinsik gears up for the next release of the latest update to its Informer platform, the company will be attending the TUG Conference to show off the beta version. The new version enables companies to make fact-based decisions about revenue, margin, and other key metrics by analyzing and visualizing real-time data within core business systems.