DBTA E-EDITION
February 2023
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News Flashes
It's time to submit nominations for the annual Database Trends and Applications Readers' Choice Awards, a competition in which the winning information management solutions, products, and services are selected by you, the users.
Trends and Applications
While the emerging constellation of next-generation data architectures—fabric, mesh, and cloud—is extremely appealing, it's still full of unknowns. These approaches present opportunities for greater data democratization, but also increased complexity. Understanding the distinctions between data fabric and mesh are also important before moving to this architecture.
Observability by definition is a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs. In other words, a system's behavior is determined from its outputs—information obtained by certain measures. Though observability as a term has been used for many years, the modern understanding originates in software observability, which is the ability to collect data about program execution, internal states of modules, and communication between components.
Data analytics—and the people who make it happen—has emerged as the centerpiece of enterprises as they advance through the turbulent months ahead. Many of these efforts are gelling around the formation of dedicated C-level leaders, such as chief data officers and chief data analytics officers (CDOs and CDAOs, respectively).
Columns - Database Elaborations
Designing a database is not a magic trick—the design process does not involve trap doors, mirrors, or unseen wires holding things up. Sometimes database designers and data architects fail to think ahead as their designs are composed. Rather than checking on each item, the designer believes that whoever provided them the requirement "knew what they were doing."
Columns - DBA Corner
Today, nobody argues about the importance of data. It is a given that data must be collected, managed, and analyzed to conduct business successfully in the modern era. But all too often the meaning of the data is not being preserved. This can result in large stores of data that are difficult to interpret and use in any meaningful manner. Situations that create unusable data can be minimized with appropriate metadata management. But this requires effort and time, and therefore metadata is frequently ignored (much like documentation).
Columns - Quest IOUG Database & Technology Insights
During Database & Technology Week 2022, an event sponsored by the Quest Oracle Community, Marc Sewtz, senior director of software development for Oracle APEX, shared the new features in Oracle APEX's release 22.2. Oracle APEX is an enterprise low-code application platform that allows developers to quickly create and deploy cloud or on-premises apps that solve real problems and provide immediate value.
Columns - Next-Gen Data Management
In 2023, companies will live and die by their data strategies. Massive increases in information generation, the cloud, and innovative technologies will be top of mind for database managers, all while an uncertain economy continually threatens budgets. For companies to build and maintain exciting applications that customers love while increasing the bottom line, they need to plan, adapt, and execute effective strategies for their data and databases.
Columns - Emerging Technologies
Sometime during the pandemic, I stopped carrying a wallet when leaving the house. Almost all shops supported—often insisted on—touchless payments, so there was no need to carry around paper money, and since my phone was fully able to perform touchless payments, my phone became all I needed to navigate the commercial world. I'm sure most of you have had a similar experience.
MV Community
Though not completely post-Covid, 2023 looks to be an uncertain economic year due to a variety of factors. Businesses continue to deal with a new hybrid reality as employees work remotely or several days in the office, leading to increased security, tapping into the cloud, AI, and more. Some companies lost portions of their workforce or recruited new talent during this upheaval; others are searching for compatible workers.