DBTA E-EDITION
May 2016
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Trends and Applications
The world's data has doubled in 18 months' time. The industry estimates that the global amount of storage will reach 40 ZB by 2020. Historically, storage architectures were built on solutions that could only scale vertically. This legacy approach to storage presents significant challenges to being able to store the tremendous quantities of data being created today in a way that is cost-effective and maintains high levels of performance. Today, most of the world's data centers are still using vertical scaling solutions for storage, which means that organizations are seeking alternatives that allow them to scale cheaply and efficiently in order to remain competitive. And now, with software defined storage moving forward, we see the use of more scale-out storage solutions in data centers.
The latest release of Oracle Database (12.1.0.2) offers a unique set of features that portend increases in application workload execution, especially for analytics and data warehousing queries. This release, debuts Oracle Database In-Memory which provides a new columnar format - the In-Memory Column Store (IMCS) - for data that is likely to be accessed regularly for aggregation or analysis, as well as other features such as In-Memory Aggregation and In-Memory Joins that potentially offer several orders of magnitude of performance improvement. Finally, the new In-Memory Advisor makes short work of determining exactly which database objects are most likely able to take advantage of the IMCS.
The elastic and distributed technologies used to run modern applications require a new approach to operations — one that learns about your infrastructure and assists IT operators with maintenance and problem-solving. The inter-dependencies between new applications are creating chaos in existing systems and surfacing the operational challenges of modern systems. Solutions like micro services architectures alleviate the scalability pains of centralized proprietary services but at a tremendous cost in complexity.
Columns - Applications Insight
Redmonk's annual programming language rankings - based on GitHub and StackOverflow traffic - were recently released and to no one's surprise, JavaScript was ranked as the most popular programming language.
Columns - Database Elaborations
Not too long ago, IT embraced the pattern language concepts of Christopher Alexander. Being an architect, of the more traditional variety, his ideas were based on creating spaces in which people felt good, even if they didn't comprehend exactly why. Architected spaces need to express multiple qualities that include being alive, whole, comforting, free, exact, egoless, and eternal. The more those qualities were embodied, the better people responded to the desirability of the space.
Columns - DBA Corner
Being able to assess the effectiveness and performance of your database systems and applications is one of the most important things that a DBA must be able to do. This can include online transaction response time evaluation, sizing of the batch window and determining whether it is sufficient for the workload, end-to-end response time management of distributed workload, and more. But in order to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your current environment and setup, service level agreements, or SLAs, are needed.
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
Many thought it was an early April Fool's Day prank, but it was no joke: On March 7, 2016, Microsoft announced the beta release of SQL Server on Linux with the intention of shipping a full release of the product by April of 2017.
MV Community
Entrinsik Inc., developer of information management software, is expanding its international presence with the opening of a European office, meeting a growing need for reporting and data analysis solutions. This global expansion will allow Entrinsik to better support its existing client base in Europe, while continuing to aggressively grow the business internationally.
Revelation Software recently hosted its user conference in Orlando, Florida, for an eager crowd of developers who wanted to learn more about all aspects of the company's technology, including the much-anticipated OpenInsight 10 release.
Rocket Software is releasing D3 Linux, version 10.2.0, providing users with more flexibility.