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Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems for US$7.4 billion has met a stumbling block in the shape of the EU Competition Commission, which has concerns over, of all things, the fate of the MySQL open source database. This is something that doesn’t appear to have worried the US DoJ, which approved the deal after a long investigation.
OpinionWire Articles - published 08/12/2009 - Mike Thompson
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When Oracle spoke about its first quarter financial results last week, listeners picked up on an interesting comment from co-president Safra Catz, who stated that data licence revenue growth had slowed down in Europe and APAC due to a very tough year-over-year comparison, and because some of its resellers had sold less. Catz highlighted SAP as a notable reseller whose Oracle database sales were down as a consequence of sales of its own business applications falling.
OpinionWire Articles - published 25/09/2009 - Angela Eager
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Ingres is a highly scalable Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) with concurrent access for thousands of users, and with scalability limited only by the underlying platform. This scalability occurs through connections to RDBMS server processes, which are achieved through the product’s multi-threaded server architecture. Ingres supports wide-scale multiple usage and the concept of Very Large DataBases (VLDBs) within a single product. Overall, the Ingres DBMS is a true enterprise-class solution, w…
Technology Audits - published 21/08/2009 - Mike Thompson
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Analytical data models have failed to exploit the power of computer hardware in a direct linear relationship. As processor architecture has evolved, there has been no similar change in the way that data is stored, which is still tied into the physical disc model with spindle movement and physical I/O being the over-riding consideration of data management. This is likely to change with the announcement that a partnership between open source database vendor Ingres and CWI of Amsterdam (a mathematical and c…
OpinionWire Articles - published 10/08/2009 - Mike Thompson
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WhereScape RED is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports the entire data warehouse lifecycle. It consists of an integrated workbench that provides a drag-and-drop interface to building a data warehouse, where Wizards are utilised to take the developer through a process for standard functions such as creating a dimension; an integrated data warehouse scheduler with full dependency management; and a metadata repository. Although it could be seen as purely a development tool, WhereScape R…
Technology Audits - published 16/07/2009 - Mike Thompson
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The acquisition of Sun Microsystems (subject to regulatory approval) could cause some concerns in the Open Source (OS) database market due to part of that acquisition being MySQL (the apparent ‘darling’ of the OS database world). Although MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems some time ago, this in itself did not raise too many concerns as Sun was seen as a strong supporter of OS and it didn’t have a collection of databases. Oracle, on the other hand, has yet to determine (or at least communicate) which…
OpinionWire Articles - published 28/05/2009 - Mike Thompson
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RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Discs (the ‘I’ originally stood for ‘Inexpensive’ when first coined at the University of California, Berkeley but has since been more commonly accepted as ‘Independent’) and is in wide usage across most organisations.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 27/05/2009 - Mike Thompson
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Sun Microsystems (1982-2009) perhaps never scaled the heights that its technology and innovations demanded. Despite being the driving force behind Java, and having its fifth employee (John Gage) credited with the phrase “the network is the computer” (which was a scarily accurate predictive statement when one looks at it from an historical perspective), for some reason the company never managed to be perceived as one of the ‘big boys’. This could hardly be put down to the shy and retiring nature of its lo…
OpinionWire Articles - published 23/04/2009 - Mike Thompson
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Google’s success in building a supreme search engine out of cheap commodity machines turned application developer attention to how they managed to process all that Web data. Google keeps much of its secret algorithms to itself but does occasionally publish information on some of the techniques it has developed in-house. MapReduce is one such technique and since its first publication in 2004 has seen a number of open source projects emulating Google’s approach.
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/04/2009 - Michael Azoff
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ASG metaCMDB is a corporate Configuration Management Database (CMDB) solution. With it an organisation can define, and visually map, a data model comprising Configuration Items (CIs), and their attributes and relationships. metaCMDB populates this data model using connectors to data sources, such as IT management solutions or discovery and dependency mapping tools, whilst ensuring the accuracy and immediacy of the data through reconciliation and synchronisation capabilities. Corporate configuration manag…
Technology Audits - published 16/04/2009 - Aanchal Sabharwal, Somak Roy, Stephen Mann
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The world of databases has long been seen as a reasonably static market. The big three (Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft) ‘own’ the space with movement of market share being measured in small percentage points. However, the introduction of the cloud has created new opportunities, and Microsoft is keen to exploit these with the introduction of SQL Server as a cloud-based offering.
OpinionWire Articles - published 03/04/2009 - Mike Thompson
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Kognitio WX2 version 6.1 is a massively parallel processing analytical database solution available in a choice of software-only, appliance-based, and on-demand versions. The solution facilitates in-memory analysis of terabytes of raw data from various organisational data sources. WX2 enables ad hoc queries on data and, dependent upon the set-up for loading data into memory, can return results in seconds without needing to build indexes or partition the data. The solution’s parallel architecture ensures l…
Technology Audits - published 11/03/2009 - Chandranshu Singh, Maxine Holt
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Although the Object Database has mainly been seen as the poor relation of its relational cousin, the rising interest in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has breathed new life into the object model.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 05/03/2009 - Mike Thompson
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IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows – version 9.5 – is a hybrid relational data server that offers native support for XML and runs on Linux, UNIX (AIX, Solaris, HP-UX ), and Windows servers. The pureXML feature within the solution enables organisations to leverage XML capabilities in transactional environments. The most notable enhancements in the latest version of DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows are in the areas of security and automation. DB2 version 9.5 features integrated role-based security and au…
Technology Audits - published 02/12/2008 - Balachandar Ganesh, Mike Thompson
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Historically, the number of indexes that could be used within an implemented RDBMS was heavily influenced by technology limitations; both of the database engine itself and the supporting infrastructure.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 27/11/2008 - Mike Thompson
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Clearpace’s NParchive is an archiving solution for structured data, which extends long-term retention to production data. It achieves a high data compression rate and hence a storage footprint reduction, easy high performance querying, a guarantee of data immutability, and support for schema changes. NParchive helps reduce e-discovery efforts, mitigates risks of regulatory non-compliance, and potentially enhances application performance by reducing the size of production databases. Clearpace employs pate…
Technology Audits - published 15/10/2008 - Chandranshu Singh, Sue Clarke
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GemFire Enterprise provides a high performance, distributed, operational data management infrastructure that has been optimised for high-volume, latency sensitive, business-critical transactional environments. It sits between clustered application processes and back-end data sources, and provides high throughput data sharing and event distribution. Organisations using transaction-based systems suffer latency between the user making the transaction and it being committed to the database, which is not acce…
Technology Audits - published 11/08/2008 - Sue Clarke
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