DBTA E-EDITION
October 2018
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Trends and Applications
There is no shortage of content flowing through today's enterprises, including data, documents, graphics, videos, and more. This is raw material that provides a wealth of opportunities—many of which are untapped—to businesses. The catch is that this data and content is scattered across various systems inside and outside of enterprises. Plus, there is not enough understanding of who views which content, and what is motivating them to consume the content. As more organizations seek to embrace digital transformation, they are turning to content automation as a way to deliver information quickly and effectively to their customers.
Shortly after contracting with a cloud service provider, a bill arrives that causes sticker shock. There are unexpected and seemingly excessive charges, and those responsible seem unable to explain how this could have happened. The situation is urgent because the amount threatens to bust the IT budget unless cost-saving changes are made immediately. But this cloud services sticker shock is often caused by mission-critical database applications, as these tend to be the most costly for a variety of reasons.
There's a renaissance happening in organizations today. Process automation is now ‘in vogue' again. It's no doubt that robotic process intelligence and artificial intelligence are driving this renaissance, helping to transform the enterprise. But what that transformation looks like is another question entirely.
To stay competitive in today's digitally driven market, the modern enterprise must keep pace with end users' expectations. Customers and employees alike want access to information anytime, anywhere, giving them the flexibility to work, shop, bank, and live on their own terms. While most forward-looking organizations are making strides to deliver this remote access—largely by moving to a hybrid IT model—many are still limited by the state of their back-end infrastructures.
These days, clouds are everywhere, providing today's database managers with an impressive range of options to choose from—including public cloud, private cloud, and, for most, somewhere in between in the hybrid realm. There may be multiple variations within a single organization, and these distinct hybrid environments are constantly evolving as well. These may be "intentional" and "accidental" hybrid environments, but accidental or not, "variety" is the watchword for many hybrid projects.
Data lakes have helped organizations deal with the massive amounts of data generated daily. They are intended to serve as a central repository for raw data, a treasure trove for data scientists to analyze and gain actionable insight. They also serve as the foundation for many "self-service" analytics initiatives. While getting data into a lake is simple, getting insight and value from all of that data, however, has proven to be challenging for many organizations. A recent Forrester report found that 60%-73% of all enterprise data goes unused for analytics. This statistic exposes some of the harsh realities of data lakes.
Columns - Database Elaborations
There has always been a need to tightly control some data items, such as passwords and Social Security numbers. Today, with the rise of concerns over personally identifiable information (PII), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and other legal mandates, a much larger group of data elements must be controlled. These legal data governance issues may need to guide our hands as we establish database designs.
Columns - DBA Corner
When you mention big data and analytics, the first thing most people think of is Hadoop, Spark, and NoSQL. But are these newer technologies required for big data projects? What about the mainframe? Mainframes are not often mentioned in big data articles and advertising. But they should be.
Columns - Quest IOUG Database & Technology Insights
As cloud adoption gains traction, one of the obvious questions is whether to simply lift and shift or also modernize an application's data tier. Modernization can mean many things. In the simplest form, modernization may involve upgrading to newer versions or incorporating a new feature set such as consolidation in Oracle using the multitenant option. At the other end of the spectrum, it might involve a complete re-envisioning, involving a move to a cloud-native data storage service.
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
On August 30, Microsoft announced the public preview of the Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) to support online migrations of various databases to Azure. What's an "online migration"? Online migration means that your databases remain operational while conducting the migration. This provides quite a few obvious benefits.
Columns - Next-Gen Data Management
As we enter a world of machine learning and data science, are there any gotchas or negatives? It sounds as if it is all sunshine and rainbows, but, as the title to this post alludes, there are.
Columns - Emerging Technologies
We've all seen the movie about the kidnap victim whose family asks for a "proof of life." The proof is typically a photograph of the victim posed with a current newspaper. Blockchain technology is now allowing us to provide similar proofs for the existence of digital assets. The immutable nature of the blockchain—the fact that it is impossible to overwrite time-stamped blockchain ledger entries—allows us to create "proof of existence" entries for digital assets.
MV Community
BlueFinity is entering a strategic distribution partnership with Uniware that will enable Uniware to introduce Evoke to the market. Uniware will distribute Evoke to businesses across Australia and New Zealand, and provide support, development and implementation services. The company will also use Evoke to design and develop its own apps for the benefit of its customers.
Kore recently attended the Eclipse Users Group (UFO) Encounter 2018 where the company showcased its new Eclipse REST APIs and the enhancements offered in the latest releases of Kourier Integrator and KommerceServer eCommerce Suite. The event took place on September 9 -11 in Atlanta, GA. The Eclipse Users Group (UFO) User Friendly Organization is an independent business organization founded to create a strategic alliance with Epicor Eclipse management, developers, and support staff to help direct and enhance the software package to our mutual benefit and satisfaction.
Revelation Software released OpenInsight 10 in April and now the company is introducing some more upgrades to the platform that will boost cloud capabilities, introduce O4W, and more. "We're finally here and we're quite pleased," said Robert Catalano, director of sales, Revelation Software, in April. "We're excited to release this new product."