DBTA E-EDITION
October 2012
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Trends and Applications
It is an understatement to say we're witnessing an example of Moore's Law — which states the number of transistors on a chip will double approximately every two years — as we seek to manage the explosion of big data. Given the impact this new wealth of information has on hundreds of millions of business transactions, there's an urgent need to look beyond traditional insight-generation tools and techniques. It's critical we develop new tools and skills to extract the insights that organizations seek through predictive analytics.
When virtualization was first born, IT departments went gangbusters using this revolutionary change to get better performance out of their servers. In all the excitement of implementation, something not so very small was overlooked — backup and recovery. The lack of proper planning forced jobs and recovery to fail, and backup admins started feeling backed into a corner. Thankfully, times have changed, and IT departments, now very aware of these issues, have gotten savvy at avoiding the potential pains of virtualization infrastructure. But a new challenge has emerged.
Hadoop and the Big Data Revolution
Columns - Notes on NoSQL
Google is the pioneer of big data. Technologies such as Google File System (GFS), BigTable and MapReduce formed the basis for open source Hadoop, which, more than any other technology, has brought big data within reach of the modern enterprise.
Columns - Database Elaborations
The beauty of a truly wonderful database design is its ability to serve many masters. And good database designers are able to empathize with those who will use their designs. In business intelligence settings, three perspectives deserve consideration when composing designs.
Columns - DBA Corner
As businesses push to reduce the data latency between analytical systems and operational systems, data warehouses begin to take on more of the character of a transactional system. For a data warehouse to deliver near real-time information, the choices generally are to update the warehouse more frequently or access data directly from operational systems. Either way, the push to reduce latency changes the nature of database performance to support the data warehouse. The main reason we created data warehouses in the first place was to separate resource-intensive analytical processing from shorter duration, but very frequent transaction processing. As the two worlds now come back together, the churn pressure on the database system can be significant.
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
Fall is my favorite time of the year for a lot of reasons. I love the cooling temperatures and the falling leaves. I enjoy the fall sports and school activities of my kids. And, perhaps best of all, I get to enjoy the yearly high-point for SQL Server professionals, the annual Community Summit put on by the Professional Association for SQL Server (www.sqlpass.org).For a technologist, the reasons to attend the annual conference of your profession should be self-evident. At the PASS 2012 Summit, there are nearly 200 technical sessions from beginner to advanced level over the duration of the week of November 5.
MV Community
Revelation Software has announced the availability of the latest release of OpenInsight Development Suite 9.3.2, which provides OpenInsight for Web (O4W) 1.4. Revelation's flagship product, OpenInsight, is a database development suite that provides Windows, Web 2.0 and .Net tools to develop and deploy mission-critical applications. There are currently more than 1.5 million licensed users of Revelation products across 60,000 deployed sites worldwide.
Rocket U2 has announced that U2 Web Development Environment (U2 Web DE) V5.0.3 has been released, and is available for the minimum database levels of UD 7.2 and UV 10.3. U2 Web DE was re-architected at V5.0 to take advantage of native UO connectivity and Connection Pooling, bringing new functionality to U2 developers who want to create web applications or extend existing U2 Web DE applications to new markets. Separately, Rocket U2 also announced that it is making a new webcast available on demand. Presented by Joan Dunn, U2 senior education consultant, the webcast provides guidance on the best approach to dictionary clean-up and the benefits it provides.