DBTA E-EDITION
October 2022

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Trends and Applications

As one of the fundamental building blocks of the metaverse, IoT digital twins have moved beyond the realms of simulation to facilitate an understanding of real-world problems. Take the European Union's "Destination Earth" initiative. This is drawing on a host of environmental, socioeconomic, and satellite data to develop digital "twins" of the planet in an effort to combat climate change, but the benefits do not stop there, particularly in the B2B world. For risk-averse companies in asset-intensive industries, digital twin technology is set to bring unparalleled value to mission-critical maintenance tasks and enable the delivery of more immersive product experiences to the end customer.

Is it getting easier or more difficult to lock down data in today's digital enterprises? Industry leaders have mixed opinions on the state of that challenge. Cloud vendors promise industrial-grade security for backend applica­tions and data, while at the same time the move to cloud increases complexity.

Software audits—in which vendors probe enterprise customer imple­mentations for overuse of licenses or unauthorized installations—are becoming a big business—and an emerging source of revenues. Whether on-premises or accessing services through the cloud, many companies report having been the subject of software audits, often resulting in tens of thousands of dollars of assessments.


Columns - Database Elaborations

In a Continuous Deployment/Continuous Integration (CD/CI) world, most commentary dances around refer­ences to database changes as being a bottleneck, hard, awkward, or even painful. The reasoning supporting this perspective of suffering seems to arise from a desire for all changes to be fairly isolated matters. After all, a new function within an API, driving a new behavior on a screen, can just slip in, start executing, and life continues.


Columns - DBA Corner

Things break and the DBA must be prepared for situations where a failure impacts the availability, integrity, or usability of a database. Reacting to failures and service disruptions is a key component of the DBA's job. This means ensuring that appropriate backups are taken for all your critical database objects. Assuming backups exist, when an inevitable database recovery is required, the next decision is how to get the data you need back as quickly as possible. But there are several different types and methods of performing recovery.


Columns - Quest IOUG Database & Technology Insights

If you're looking for a quick and easy way to leverage ana­lytics focused on a specific topic, look no further. During his BLUEPRINT 4D session, Patrick Wheeler, product management, Oracle Database, showed how to build a cloud data mart in just 20 minutes. So, what is a data mart? A data mart is a sim­ple form of data warehouse focused on a single subject or line of business. With a data mart, teams can access data and gain insights faster because they don't have to spend time searching within a more complex data warehouse or manually aggregat­ing data from different sources.


Columns - Next-Gen Data Management

British mathematician Clive Humby famously said in 2006 that "Data is the new oil." In the 16 years since, companies of all sizes have drilled for and stored more and more data about their customers and business operations to drive performance and growth to reach their goals. In conjunction with the increased use of the consumer internet, data creation has exploded in recent years—considering the majority of the world's data collected over the course of human history has occurred in just the last two years alone. As a result, entire businesses and industries have been built solely on having access to unique and useful data.


Columns - Emerging Technologies

PostgreSQL arguably has been somewhat overlooked by database commentators. PostgreSQL doesn't have the mas­sive marketing machine of Oracle or Microsoft, and it lacks the "new kid on the block" appeal of MongoDB or CockroachDB. However, PostgreSQL continues to increase in importance in terms of deployments and mindshare. This year, PostgreSQL overtook MongoDB as the "most loved" and "most wanted" database platform. Developer enthusiasm is probably the strongest leading indicator of future deployments since developers, more than anyone else, get to decide what tech­nologies are used in an application.

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