DBTA E-EDITION
May 2009
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Trends and Applications
In this challenging economy, many IT organizations are putting even greater focus on identifying how to best meet business objectives with fewer people and reduced IT budgets. They are discovering how the mainframe can help them deal with these challenges.
IT GRC—or, IT governance, risk and compliance—is rapidly gaining the attention of CIOs and CISOs in businesses across the country. After all, the objective of IT GRC is to more efficiently strike an appropriate balance between business reward and business risk, an essential equation that these executives must attain. How does IT GRC help? By replacing traditional, siloed approaches to addressing individual components with a more unified approach that takes advantage of the many commonalities and interrelationships that exist among governance, compliance and risk management.
Setting up a replication configuration is a fairly standard way to enable disaster recovery (DR) for business-critical databases. In such a configuration, changes from a production or primary system are propagated to a standby or secondary system. One of the important technology decisions that organizations make upfront is the choice of the replication architecture.
Columns - Applications Insight
Both open source software ( OSS) and cloud computing continue to experience strong interest and growth despite the economic downturn. Clearly, both provide the promise of reduced operating and software licensing costs. For instance, corporations looking to reduce the cost incurred by Microsoft Office licensing are looking more closely at the open source OpenOffice alternative, or at Google's online application suite, Google Apps. There's understandable resistance to moving from the rich experience offered by Microsoft to these lower-cost alternatives, but resistance has a way of disappearing in the face of financial imperatives.
Columns - Database Elaborations
An inherent awkwardness exists in every many-to-many relationship between entities. Ambiguity causes this persistent awkwardness, primarily because a many-to-many relationship is such a fuzzy thing. In data discovery, encountering many-to-many relationships may actually expose a level of disregard about details by the subject matter experts.
Columns - DBA Corner
The economy is a wreck and things will likely get worse before they improve. Unemployment is even worse; almost 600,000 jobs were lost in January 2009, sending the unemployment rate to 7.6%, the highest it has been in 16 years. So many data professionals are out there looking for their next challenge … and more probably will be job hunting before the year is out.
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
Third-party applications are a very important part of the IT landscape. Many of us have faced the common dilemma of trying to decide whether to build or buy that next important application our organizations need. (By the way, I'm talking about smaller, specialized applications like an inventory management system for the company warehouse, or a practice management system for a doctor's office. I'm not talking about the huge and incredibly sophisticated ERP systems like SAP and Oracle Financials.)
MV Community
IBM has launched the early adopter program for U2JPA, which is planned for general availability at the end of this quarter. The Java Persistence API is a Java framework that allows developers to manage relational data. IBM is seeking participants who program in Java and are interested in testing the U2 Java Persistence API.
Revelation has announced OpenInsight 9.0.1. The 9.0.1 release includes new functionality as well as bug fixes, Robert Catalano, director of sales for Revelation, tells DBTA. The company has also announced that it is in the preliminary stages of planning its 2010 users conference.
The U2UG (International IBM U2 User Group), an independent volunteer body representing users of IBM U2 and related MultiValue technologies, has announced the results of the 2009 board election.