Top Articles

Oracle Reports Drop In Database Sales
[2009-09-17] A worrisome bit of news pertaining to the database industry was released yesterday. Oracle reported some iffy revenue figures for its first fiscal quarter of 2010 (no, that's not a typo - Oracle just runs on an odd calendar), and lack of interest in the corporation's database offerings seemed to be a key reason for the fall.

IBM Acquires Database Specialist
[2009-05-06] A database company made it big this earlier week. Although financial details weren't disclosed, IBM announced yesterday that it had acquired Exeros, which should represent about as good an end for the privately held business as its owners could have hoped to see.

IBM-Sun Tussle May Still Have Huge Impact On Database Market
[2009-04-08] People who are interested in search engines spun rumors for what seemed like an endless amount of time as Microsoft tried to acquire Yahoo last year. Now, although little is happening at the moment, the IBM-Sun relationship has created a similar spectacle for database professionals.

Moving Desktop Based Databases into Enterprise 2.0
[2009-03-25] I have written about QuickBase's moves in the enterprise 2.0 space on this blog before (see - Changing Organization Behavior at XM Radio through Enterprise 2.0). QuickBase is an Enterprise 2.0 shareable database that lets you select ready-made online workgroup applications or templates designed to solve common business problems, customize them to suit individual processes, and share within a team or an enterprise.

First Look: Database Builder Truviso
[2009-03-04] I got a second chance to chat with the folks at Truviso recently. Truviso was founded after a Professor and his PhD student, at Berkeley went back to the fundamentals of data management and predicated that in a world of highly interconnected objects it would be necessary to eliminate the batch-centric database process of "store first, query later". Truviso is the result, focused on providing analysis in real time and continuously. This system is based on PostgreSQL allowing an integration of stream processing and traditional queries.

Fully Automated Database Mining With KXEN
[2009-02-18] I got my first chance to really see KXEN's product a little while ago and, as I am off to Predictive Analytics World tomorrow, I thought I would blog about it. KXEN was founded in 1998. The product is designed to deliver automated data mining and predictive analytics at a function level - the user doesn't have to choose variables or algorithms.

Top Tech Companies To Develop White Spaces Database
[2009-02-06] Seven well-known technology companies have announced they are working together to create a white spaces database to manage the use of the vacant television broadband spectrum, commonly referred to as TV white spaces.

Requirements For Successful Database Conversion
[2009-01-14] The goal is to successfully expand, correct, and migrate the current data from one automated system which currently supports the Customer program to the new New System system.

Marty Gubar Talks About Combining Data Mining and OLAP
[2008-12-17] Marty Gubar presented on Deliver Depper Insight by Combining Data Mining and OLAP. Marty presented on Oracle's analytic spectrum and how OLAP and Data Mining fit and can be combined. OLAP and data mining are embedded in the Oracle database and share security, the partitioning, ETL etc. All can be accessed using PL/SQL so cubes (OLAP) can be joined with data mining and spatial etc. This supports what Marty calls the Analysis Continuum:

Charlie Berger Speaks On Oracle Data Mining
[2008-12-03] Charlie Berger of Oracle presented on Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM). Charlie joined Oracle from Thinking Machines about a decade ago and have been putting machine learning algorithms into the Oracle kernel. Data Mining, in database or otherwise, sifts through data to find hidden patterns, discover new insights and make predictions. For instance:

World-Class Marketing Database Has The Ability To Change
[2008-11-20] Here are several excerpts from an excellent article by Shay Young, Senior Database Analyst with Euro RSCG Discovery, What Is A World-Class Marketing Database?:

Virtual Expo For Database Professionals Approaching
[2008-11-05] Wednesdays tend to be dull days - you're past the slog of the start of the week, but pretty far away from having 48 hours off. If you're looking for something to do on Wednesday, November 12th, then, consider attending Toad Virtual Expo 2008.

Data Management Continuum Guidance
[2008-10-29] All data follows a lifecycle from initial creation and storage, to protection and retention, and each of these phases has differing and unique requirements. Thus there should be a range of storage devices and processes to address these varying requirements. For example, enterprise devices, while having higher redundancy and performance are not as flexible as mid-range arrays and represent a higher cost per GB of capacity.

Upcoming Teradata Product Unveiled
[2008-10-15] We know, we know - the economy sucks (the Dow's down 450 points at the moment), and unless a product can spit out gold bricks, you don't want to buy anything new. Still, Teradata Corporation has just announced the Teradata 13.0 database, and the thing seems to be worth a second look.

Oracle Will Win the SaaS/Cloud Competition
[2008-10-01] Really, I'm not obsessed with cloud computing! I'll try to write about something else next. However, I wanted to reply to a post from Chris Keene, titled: "Larry Whistles Past the (Cloud) Graveyard".

Relationships Between Data Sets and Paid Search Keywords
[2008-09-17] In recent weeks the export function of massive data sets has been my best friend and worst enemy. Seemingly endless mounds of exact match keyword bliss has been pouring into my ODBC and then through to AdWords Editor (as well as uploads into Yahoo! SM and MSN), nearly seamlessly. Little snips and CONCATENATE functions here and there, and, within a few hours a beast is unleashed on the market capable of tremendously valuable insights and high ROI potential.

Stopping People From Hacking Your Apache Server
[2008-08-20] A geeky friend of mine just told me that he's been seeing hackers slip a few lines of code into their Apache web server configuration and have all their traffic redirected to porn sites. Now I'm paranoid! How can I detect if this has happened to my own server?

Google Introduces New Search Appliance
[2008-08-07] Google has introduced a new version of its Google Search Appliance that can now index up to 10 million documents of an organization's content in a single box.

Estimating the Size of the Data Warehouse
[2008-07-16] To estimate the size of the data warehouse, including the base-level data warehouse, summary-level data warehouse, and the metadata stored in the data warehouse.

New SQL Injection Scanners from Microsoft and HP
[2008-06-25] Microsoft and HP have both released separate tools to help companies scan their web sites for SQL injection flaws that will lead to a compromise of your web site.

Hacking Oracle Database Configuration Files
[2008-05-28] This Google hack is fairly interesting when you can get into the configuration of an oracle database because someone forgot to put a password in front of the web login. Stunningly, we found one such system, and if we had been evil, we could have owned this database system in less than 3 minutes.

Dark Reading's Top Database Hacks
[2008-05-12] If you are wondering just how hackers are working their way into your back end databases, Dark Reading has a list of the top six database hacks being used in the field today.

New Oracle Hack
[2008-04-30] Never assume anything, now you can't trust even typed data with oracle.

The 451 Group's Database Report
[2008-04-09] I want to thank Matt Aslett & The 451 Group for being brave enough to publish this report on the impact of open source databases on the DB market.

IBM Joins List Of EnterpriseDB Investsors
[2008-03-25] EnterpriseDB just raised $10M in Series C financing. IBM joined the list of investors including Fidelity Ventures, Valhalla Partners and Charles River Ventures. To date, EnterpriseDB has raised $37.5M (compared to the $39M that MySQL had raised in total after Series C).