OLAP BI IM stuff

YouTube - NoSQL

2010-03-06T12:50:00.000-08:00

YouTube
- NoSQL: "Brian Aker gives a lightning talk (10 minutes) about NoSQL during the Nov 2009 OpenSQLCamp in Portland, Oregon. Notes are at"

Ex-Microsofties Launch $500 'Meaning Machine' For Large Data Sets

2009-12-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

Ex-Microsofties Launch $500 'Meaning Machine' For Large Data Sets: "The new company is called Data Applied and offers very affordable 'data mining in the cloud' - it applies automated algorithms to large sets of data in order to extract patterns, preconditions and outliers.

Commercial licenses cost under $500 and are aimed to bring the kind of power to sales, marketing, engineering, social sciences or non-profit organizations that only banks and insurance companies used to be able to afford."

Amazon's Data Shipping Goes Both Ways Now by PC World: Yahoo! Tech

2009-08-15T06:11:00.000-07:00

Amazon's Data Shipping Goes Both Ways Now by PC World: Yahoo! Tech: "The AWS Import/Export service, announced in May, lets customers use standard shipping services to send Amazon chunks of data that would take days or weeks to get there on typical leased lines. For example, enterprises with a T-1 line (1.5Mb per second) typically can avoid an 82-day upload by sending 1TB of data via AWS Import/Export, according to Amazon. Customers are already uploading terabytes of data every week, the company said."

Rittman Mead Consulting � Blog Archive � Drilling Down in the Oracle Next-Generation Reference DW Architecture

2009-07-17T06:01:00.000-07:00

Rittman Mead Consulting � Blog Archive � Drilling Down in the Oracle Next-Generation Reference DW Architecture

It Must be Crap on Relational Dabases Week | High Scalability

2009-07-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

It Must be Crap on Relational Dabases Week | High Scalability: "It's hard to be a relational database lately. After years of faithful service everywhere you look the world is turning against you:"

Where Oracle's Applications Stack Sees Red Ink, Its Customers See Opportunity - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

2009-03-27T13:27:00.000-07:00

Where Oracle's Applications Stack Sees Red Ink, Its Customers See Opportunity - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership: "The timing of all this is beneficial for Oracle customers: The end of Oracle's fiscal year arrives soon (May 31), and buyers may now have more leverage to sign very favorable end-of-year deals.

'Oracle provides the sweetest discounts and deals as it approaches its fiscal fourth quarter,' notes a March 2009 Forrester Research report (subscription required). 'Forrester has seen indications that Oracle is displaying a growing willingness to provide incentives for new licenses, creative implementation proposals by Oracle Consulting, free training and vendor-led financing.'"

MySQL Admin and Development Tools Round Up | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine

2009-03-25T11:37:00.000-07:00

MySQL Admin and Development Tools Round Up | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine

Test Center: Slacker databases break all the old rules | InfoWorld | Review | 2009-03-24 | By Peter Wayner

2009-03-24T05:10:00.000-07:00

Test Center: Slacker databases break all the old rules | InfoWorld | Review | 2009-03-24 | By Peter Wayner: "Amazon SimpleDB, Apache CouchDB, Google App Engine, and Persevere, offering far greater simplicity than SQL, may have a better way of storing data for your Web app"

Coding Errors that Affect Security: Sort by Language, Phyla, or Kingdom - ReadWriteWeb

2009-03-23T07:04:00.000-07:00

Support all the usual suspects, but also PLSQL/TSQL. Interesting! (And needed)

Coding Errors that Affect Security: Sort by Language, Phyla, or Kingdom - ReadWriteWeb: "Enter Fortify, a software security company that has organized security issues by both vulnerability category and by language so developers can easily ascertain the types of errors that have an impact on security."

eWEEK Labs on IBM-Sun: Databases Would Feed Off Each Other

2009-03-18T13:13:00.000-07:00

eWEEK Labs on IBM-Sun: Databases Would Feed Off Each Other: "So, one might assume that IBM would do the same thing with MySQL, continuing it as a separate product. MySQL, in turn, could inherit some technology from DB2 and even Informix.

However, according to a report in late 2007, six years after the acquisition of Informix, the number of Informix installations dropped drastically, to 20,000, with no information from IBM about where these users went. (Did they migrate to IBM’s own DB2 product? Did they switch to a competing product from Oracle or Microsoft?)

Should MySQL customers worry that they might find themselves forced to choose another product?"

Yahoo! News - Microsoft to accelerate relational capabilities for the cloud by InfoWorld: Yahoo! Tech

2009-03-10T12:53:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! News - Microsoft to accelerate relational capabilities for the cloud by InfoWorld: Yahoo! Tech: "Microsoft will expose the network protocol from its SQL Server database as the service protocol in SDS (SQL Data Services), the cloud-based version of the database, thus enabling customers to use a full relational model in the cloud."

Is the Relational Database Doomed? - ReadWriteWeb

2009-02-13T15:55:00.000-08:00

Is the Relational Database Doomed? - ReadWriteWeb: "Today, we are in a slightly different situation. For an increasing number of applications, one of these benefits is becoming more and more critical; and while still considered a niche, it is rapidly becoming mainstream, so much so that for an increasing number of database users this requirement is beginning to eclipse others in importance. That benefit is scalability. As more and more applications are launched in environments that have massive workloads, such as web services, their scalability requirements can, first of all, change very quickly and, secondly, grow very large. The first scenario can be difficult to manage if you have a relational database sitting on a single in-house server. For example, if your load triples overnight, how quickly can you upgrade your hardware? The second scenario can be too difficult to manage with a relational database in general."

Rittman Mead Consulting » Blog Archive » Rittman Mead are Recruiting for a Senior Consultant

2008-07-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

Rittman Mead Consulting » Blog Archive » Rittman Mead are Recruiting for a Senior Consultant: "Our aim at Rittman Mead is to build the company that the best Oracle BI & DW consultants and trainers would want to work at, and as such our models are companies such as Fog Creek Software, Miracle, Pythian and Kimball University. We’ve all got young families so we try to make allowances for family commitments, however expect the hours to be long and your commitment to be big. In return, we offer a competitive salary, a share in the company, an opportunity to work with the best people in the industry, a rapid acceleration of your Oracle BI knowledge and sponsorship to present at events such as Oracle Open World, ODTUG, Collaborate and the UKOUG Conference."

Implementing Upgrade of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

2008-06-26T10:28:00.000-07:00

Implementing Upgrade of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition: "In the previous installment of our series dedicated to SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, we presented a variety of reasons that might influence your decision to upgrade to one of the full-fledged members of the SQL Server 2005 family (Workgroup, Standard, or Enterprise). In this article, we will discuss the actual implementation of this process, pointing out additional factors (such as conversion of User Instance databases or altering some of its restrictive default settings) that might affect its complexity."

Kimball University: Microsoft SQL Server Comes of Age for Data Warehousing > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

2008-06-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

Lots of people consider 2005 up to the task...

Kimball University: Microsoft SQL Server Comes of Age for Data Warehousing > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions: "Microsoft's upcoming SQL Server 2008 release includes several new features and enhancements that are extremely valuable in data warehousing and business intelligence systems — as those already leveraging these capabilities on other database platforms will attest. The key performance enhancements include database compression, partitioning, and star schema optimization. In this article I briefly describe the benefits of these three features in any DW/BI deployment."

IBM DB2's 25th Anniversary: Birth Of An Accidental Empire > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

2008-06-13T05:39:00.000-07:00

IBM DB2's 25th Anniversary: Birth Of An Accidental Empire > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions: "At first, relational database was a highly mocked product, halting in its performance compared to the programmed-path systems. Now it represents an $18.6 billion a year market."

Does your company still use VSAM? Most companies with mainframes do... learn the context of why those dinosaurs won't give it up here. A good read.

Biggest Under Reported Story: Google's BigTable Costs 10 Times Less than Amazon's SimpleDB | High Scalability

2008-06-10T08:05:00.000-07:00

Biggest Under Reported Story: Google's BigTable Costs 10 Times Less than Amazon's SimpleDB High Scalability: "On SimpleDB a 1TB database costs $1,500/month and BigTable costs in the $180/month range. As you grow into ever larger data sets the difference becomes even more compelling."

This is important... game changing.. etc etc. For professional DBAs - figure out how to educate your management on these options, and take the initiative to suggest times when it might be practical to do so.

Believe it or not, but "security" alone is not a good enough reason to keep your data store in house. Security measures are a challenge to truly "get," but have been proven nonetheless. All of your customers already use companies that use these services to store their data and accept it. And those companies are not suffering the sort of hysterical breaches some people resistant to change rant about. If you are hanging on this, it's only a matter of time before some high-priced, respected consultants come through the door and lay the case out to management how they can save millions, and it is safe. Right after that, Gartner and Forrester will endorse the whole game. Making sure you are ahead of the curve when the day comes will put you in a great position.

The way I see it, the number one reason for massive in house storage expenses is speed of access... and it is a big one.

Regardless, try to brainstorm, and pull in some developers if necessary, ways using these options might be possible within your Enterprise.

Q&A With Gartner's Don Feinberg on Database as a Service and Cloud DBs > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

2008-05-28T07:43:00.000-07:00

Interesting! Amazon is behind Oracle, Sun, and IBM's offerings!

Q&A With Gartner's Don Feinberg on Database as a Service and Cloud DBs > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions: "You call them up and say, 'I want an instance of your database in the cloud.' They contract with Amazon EC2, set up the instance and give me a simple link. Now I have my database in the cloud. Oracle will also let you host your license on EC2. They're going to call it Oracle in a Cloud, but you'll have to put it on the EC2 virtual machine yourself. That's a little different than what Vertica and EntepriseDB are doing because they will handle everything and you pay one vendor rather than dealing with Amazon on your own."

It's Official: SEC to Propose XBRL-Based Financial Reporting > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

2008-05-19T06:19:00.000-07:00

Have a database and analytics background, and looking to start a business? Look no further.... It's a sure winner.

It's Official: SEC to Propose XBRL-Based Financial Reporting > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions: "It's unanimous and not unexpected. The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that it has voted to propose a rule requiring all U.S. companies to report their financial results using eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). The XML-based reporting language, which has been used in the US since 2005 as part of a voluntary program, is expected to speed investment as well as regulatory analyses."

Hitting 300 SimbleDB Requests Per Second on a Small EC2 Instance | High Scalability

2008-05-18T17:03:00.000-07:00

Hitting 300 SimbleDB Requests Per Second on a Small EC2 Instance High Scalability: "High Performance Multithreaded Access to Amazon SimpleDB is a great follow up to the idea in How SimpleDB Differs from a RDBMS that more programming is the price paid for performance in SimpleDB. It shows how much work and infrastructure is required to batter better performance out of SimpleDB."

High Scalability | Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

2008-05-18T17:02:00.000-07:00

High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.: "Searching around the HS website I noticed that there are no articles regarding db2, which has an express edition, free of charge and from what I know there aren't any restrictions.
Being a powerful database system I thought it could make be an alternative to MySQL, PostgreSQL databases.
Here is the IBM statement:"

Top Queries in SQL Server 2005

2008-04-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

Top Queries in SQL Server 2005

This article illustrates how to query dynamic management views to find the TOP queries based on average CPU and average I/O.

Kimball University: Should You Use An ETL Tool? > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

2008-04-07T09:01:00.000-07:00

Kimball University: Should You Use An ETL Tool? > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions: "Kimball University: Should You Use An ETL Tool?

You can still hand-code an extract, transform and load system, but in most cases the self-documentation, structured development path and extensibility of an ETL tool is well worth the cost. Here's a close look at the pros and cons of buying rather than building."

Digg - Sun buys MySQL

2008-01-16T08:58:00.000-08:00

Digg - Sun buys MySQL: "Didn't see that one coming. Blog contains details to what this could mean for both companies. May as well be one of the most important takeovers of 2008 already!"

Microsoft SQL 2005 Maintenance Wizard Part 3

2007-04-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

Microsoft SQL 2005 Maintenance Wizard Part 3: "This article focuses on the SQL Server 2005 Maintenance Plan Wizard for creating Database Backup operations. The Maintenance Plan Wizard is a graphical interface for creating a variety of database housekeeping tasks. In addition to Backup operations, maintenance items such as reorganizing data and index files, updating statistics and performing consistency checks can be performed. These tasks should be done on a regular basis to insure SQL performance and data integrity are optimized. All of these tasks can be executed using TSQL commands, however the Maintenance Plan Wizard makes selecting these tasks and their options easy. In addition, the Wizard will assemble all of your selected tasks into a reusable and customizable package.

Part 1 of this series introduced the Maintenance Plan Wizard and demonstrated how to use the Wizard for creating Data Check Integrity Tasks, Shrink Database Tasks, Reorganize Index Tasks, and the Rebuild Index Tasks.

Part 2 continued with explanation of Agents XPs, then demonstrated the Update Statistics Task as well the Clean Up History Task. Lastly, the Designer was introduced. The Designer can be used for both creating maintenance tasks from scratch and for modifying packages created by the Wizard. "

BI in Healthcare: Lessons Every Industry Should Heed

2007-03-31T06:14:00.000-07:00

BI in Healthcare: Lessons Every Industry Should Heed: "This month, Jill Dyche’s colleague, Shravan Miriyala, describes why the healthcare industry has learned some lessons from the rest of us. At the same time, recent healthcare BI efforts can remind us of some tried-and-true BI best practices."

SQL Server 2005 Best Practice Analyzer

2007-03-31T06:06:00.000-07:00

SQL Server 2005 Best Practice Analyzer: "I've been testing the re-released Best Practice Analyzer for SQL2005 called SQL Server Best Practice Analyzer 2.0, available for download here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=da0531e4-e94c-4991-82fa-f0e3fbd05e63&displaylang=en

I find this tool to be very handy for identifying database Security & Performance issues and making fix recommendations, even though it is CTP and not final release yet.

It does NOT have to be installed on a remote server, just on a DBA's Mgmt Studio workstation. It DOES, however, require that you have Admin priviledges on the remote SQL Server in order to access the Windows registry."

Quick MS Access (JET SQL) to SQL Server (T-SQL) Cheatsheet

2007-03-31T05:45:00.000-07:00

Quick MS Access (JET SQL) to SQL Server (T-SQL) Cheatsheet: "Lots of questions come up in the SQL Team forums about conversions between Access and T-SQL and some of the differences between the two SQL dialects. Here's a few handy things to help you out with converting your projects. Check in now and then as this short list will eventually grow as more things come up."

Survey: MySQL use rises 25 percent | News.blog | CNET News.com

2007-03-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

Survey: MySQL use rises 25 percent News.blog CNET News.com: "Data released Thursday from an Evans Data Group survey of database usage among developers shows MySQL use increased from 32 percent in 2004 to 40 percent last year. The survey tallied real production use in corporate environments, not just tire-kicking or pilot projects, Evans spokesman Jon Broenen said. "

40,000 ASU Students Leap to Google Apps; University Pays Zero - Technology News by InformationWeek

2007-03-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

40,000 ASU Students Leap to Google Apps; University Pays Zero - Technology News by InformationWeek: "'Providing e-mail to students alone cost us half-a-million dollars in expense every year,' says Sannier, 'not to mention the time of my staff to support it.'

Even more important, he says, is the pace of innovation: 'Now we're on Google's development curve, not ours.' "

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Using a RAM Disk with Analysis Services

2007-03-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Using a RAM Disk with Analysis Services: "One topic that has come up occasionally over the years is whether there is any merit in using a RAM Disk with Analysis Services to improve performance. Certainly in the SQL Server world they seem to have some benefits (see for example Tony Rogerson's post here: http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/tonyrogerson/archive/2006/08/24/958.aspx) but as far as I know no-one has ever done any testing for Analysis Services so when I found myself with a bit of free time and a customer who might potentially benefit I thought I'd do so myself."

How to transfer terrabytes of data

2007-03-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

Wired News: Google's Next-Gen of Sneakernet: "How do you get 120 terabytes of data -- the equivalent of 123,000 iPod shuffles (roughly 30 million songs) -- from A to B? For the most part, the old-fashioned way: via a sneakernet. It's not glamorous, but Google engineers hope to at least end the arduous process of transferring massive quantities of data -- which can literally take weeks to upload onto the internet -- with something affectionately called 'FedExNet' by the scientists who use it."

BI Strategy for Subscription-Oriented Business

2007-03-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

BI Strategy for Subscription-Oriented Business: "Typical questions include:

What is the current pool of subscribers?
What parameters are contributing to the growth of this pool?
How to increase that pool by tuning all the contributing factors?
How many people are signing up everyday, and where do they come from?
How to reduce the attrition rate by knowing the reason people are canceling?
How to lower the billing failures by acting more proactively?
What is the most effective marketing strategy?
How to forecast future metrics based on historical data points? "

Oops! Technician's error wipes out data for state fund - CNN.com

2007-03-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

As a DBA, do you test your backups? Restore them periodically, to make sure the media works, etc? Old veterans all have a horror story about what made them get the religion of testing backups (in my case, it was backups with very minor imperfections, that would cause single bits to flip in a data warehouse.)

Don't be this guy...

Oops! Technician's error wipes out data for state fund - CNN.com: "JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) -- Perhaps you've experienced that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disk drive containing an account worth $38 billion.

That's what happened to a computer technician reformatting a disk drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue. While doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account -- one of Alaska residents' biggest perks -- and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well."

SimonS' SQL Server Stuff : Online Index White Paper

2007-03-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

SimonS' SQL Server Stuff : Online Index White Paper: "Paul Randal recently informed me of a new white paper on online index operations. The whitepaper can be found here Online Index White Paper.
This is one of many whitepapers that have been published lately by Bob"

Finding Foreign Key Constraints in Oracle

2007-03-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

For a developer to identify and disable foreign key constraints is a difficult task. A brief description on the foreign key (referential integrity) constraints will go a long way in identifying and disabling these constraints. Read on to learn more.

Finding Foreign Key Constraints in Oracle

Black Belt Administration: Performance Dashboard for Microsoft SQL Server, Part I

2007-03-19T06:23:00.000-07:00

Black Belt Administration: Performance Dashboard for Microsoft SQL Server, Part I: "As I state in BlackBelt Components: Manage Nulls in OLAP Reports and other articles of this subseries, the Black Belt articles represent an attempt to minimize the setup required in simply getting to a point within an article where we can actually perform hands-on practice with the component(s) or method(s) under consideration. I typically accomplish this by using existing report samples or other “prefabricated” objects that either come along as part of the installation of the applications involved, or that are otherwise readily accessible to virtually any organization that has installed the related components of the Microsoft business intelligence solution. In the Black Belt Administration articles, I focus upon procedures and tools that specifically relate to the job of the Reporting Services Administrator, versus report authors and other developers, although in many real world scenarios, as most of us are aware, these roles often intersect."

Pulling the Back-Room Data Warehouse onto Center Stage with RFID

2007-03-16T07:56:00.000-07:00

Pulling the Back-Room Data Warehouse onto Center Stage with RFID: "But how do all these pieces of the RFID-DW-BI jigsaw puzzle fit together. First, let us refresh ourselves with a few concepts on RFID and also BI/DW before we put it all together into an architectural framework."

mySQL DBA: Looking for DBA's

2007-03-15T16:17:00.000-07:00

mySQL DBA: Looking for DBA's: "Send me your resume, and I'll hook you up with a job at Yahoo!

Specifically I'm looking for a mySQL DBA, with 64-bit Linux Experience.
If you have more sys-admin / development skills then actually DBA skills no worries, if your good I'll give you a crash course in how to tune / improve uses of mysql.

Send your inquires to

mysqldba1@yahoo.com"

Oracle Comes Clean—Sort of: TDWI

2007-03-15T16:04:00.000-07:00

Commentary on the Hyperion purchase:

Oracle Comes Clean—Sort of: TDWI: "“Oracle does have an OLAP product, but we do see customers wanting to have this multi-source, heterogeneous system, so we’ll take good advantage of Essbase and we’ll continue as a strategy to offer OLAP functionality, and lots of BI functionality in the Oracle database,” Rodwick comments."

Geeks in Paradise | InfoWorld | How to Handle Network Growing Pains | March 14, 2007 09:35 AM | By Cynthia Kuo

2007-03-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

A nice set of slides from the Sys Admin for Digg.

Geeks in Paradise InfoWorld How to Handle Network Growing Pains March 14, 2007 09:35 AM By Cynthia Kuo: "Ron Gorodetzky, co-founder of Revision3 and the Senior Systems Administrator at Digg, was a presenter at the Southern California Linux Expo 2007. His presentation entitled Admin++, what root never told you walks through his own personal experience helping to manage the technical-side of two start-ups and the growing pains along the way as the bandwidth, hardware, and software requirements grew. Ron recommends a lot of useful Linux tools to help you scale along the way, and his points on infrastructure, site and servers, can be used in any environment."

Mastering Enterprise BI: Time Intelligence Pt. II

2007-03-12T18:33:00.000-07:00

Mastering Enterprise BI: Time Intelligence Pt. II: "The purpose of the Mastering Enterprise BI subset of my Introduction to MSSQL Server Analysis Services series is to focus on techniques for implementing features in Analysis Services that parallel – or outstrip - those found in the more “mature” enterprise OLAP packages. In many cases, which I try to outline in my articles at appropriate junctures, the functionality of the OLAP solutions within well-established, but expensive, packages, such as Cognos PowerPlay Transformer and Cognos PowerPlay, can be met – often exceeded – in most respects by the Analysis Services / Reporting Services combination – at a tiny fraction of the cost. "

Survey: CIOs Are Gearing Up To Hire Database Specialists

2007-03-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

Interested in checking out the market yourself? Check the Indeed job widget on the right sidebar.

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Survey: CIOs Are Gearing Up To Hire Windows, Networking, And Database Specialists: "Also in demand are specialists in database management for Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2. "

It's The End Of The Business Intelligence World As We Know It

2007-03-12T09:18:00.000-07:00

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: It's The End Of The Business Intelligence World As We Know It: "The once staid business intelligence market is about to explode into something very different. Oracle's deal to acquire Hyperion Solutions for $3.3 billion, disclosed March 1, is the latest in a series of developments since the beginning of the year that make such a market blowout inevitable. In January, NCR announced plans to spin off Teradata, its data warehousing division, as a standalone company. About the same time, Hewlett-Packard revealed that it has been quietly developing a data warehousing platform of its own. "

mySQL DBA: Putting mySQL 5.0.33 into production

2007-03-11T19:02:00.000-07:00

mySQL DBA: Putting mySQL 5.0.33 into production: "Otherwise it's a straight forward upgrade for me, so far.

I have a mysql 4.0 database that was about 200GB in size, most of that data was removed yet the ibdata file is still 200GB. So, what I did was

mysqldump --single-transaction -uroot -p --all-databases --master-data=1 > all_databases.sql"

Tools, tips, and links on optimizing mysql | drupal.org

2007-03-10T08:51:00.000-08:00

Tools, tips, and links on optimizing mysql drupal.org: "1. Get this script, upload it, unzip it, and install it in your /etc folder (at the root of your server, not your Drupal install, right). Then run it from the command line by entering sh /path-to-file/tuning-primer.sh

The script will run and what you'll be left with is an output with some info and suggestions about your MySQL settings. Was shocked to learned that on my VPS the cache was not even enabled - very helpful to know!"

BI Maturity - What level are you?

2007-03-10T08:32:00.000-08:00

Business Intelligence Review: "How is your business intelligence (BI) investment in your company? What's the maturity of your BI architecture and processes? "

Can you solve Joe Celko's SQL puzzles?

2007-03-08T06:57:00.000-08:00

From the book, these puzzles demonstrate the thinking processes required to solve difficult SQL problems. See if you can solve them before checking on the answers.

Can you solve Joe Celko's SQL puzzles?

Inside Second Life's Data Centers - Technology News by InformationWeek

2007-03-06T12:11:00.001-08:00

Inside Second Life's Data Centers - Technology News by InformationWeek: "Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and AMD servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, said Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. MySQL allows the server farms to scale horizontally, by adding large numbers of low-power servers as needed, rather than vertically, which would have required Second Life to run on a few, powerful systems, Miller said."

They are also porting to Mono - or .NET.

SimonS SQL Server Stuff - Microsoft SQL Server MVP

2007-03-05T19:00:00.000-08:00

Interesting approach... I think this could be very valuable if done right.

SimonS SQL Server Stuff - Microsoft SQL Server MVP: "I've just posted the first of a series of webcast/demos/how tos that I will be continuing over the next few months. There are many common tasks that are much easier to show than explain, especially around SSIS and coding in general."

Partners prompt Oracle's multicore price reduction

2007-03-05T15:18:00.000-08:00

Partners prompt Oracle's multicore price reduction: "In response to requests from some of its distribution partners, Oracle Corp. has lowered the licensing prices for some of its multicore server software to be more competitive with database rival Microsoft Corp. "

TableDiff.exe - a cool SQL Server 2005 tool

2007-03-04T06:39:00.000-08:00

TableDiff.exe - a cool SQL Server 2005 tool: "This compares 2 tables in the same database on the same server and creates a new table called DiffsTable that holds the differences and
creates a T-SQL script file at d:\MyTable1_MyTable2_diff.sql
that holds the UPDATE/INSERT/DELETE statements to synchronize the 2 tables:"

SQL 2005 Maintenance Wizard Part 2

2007-03-02T13:33:00.000-08:00

SQL 2005 Maintenance Wizard Part 2: "In Part 1 of this series, the first four tasks (Database Integrity, Shrink DB, Reorganize and Rebuild Index) were discussed. We’ll continue with the task Update Statistics. All of the examples in this series will act on the Microsoft SQL Server Adventure Works database."

Microsoft unlocks SQL Server 2005 license for virtualization

2007-03-01T10:32:00.000-08:00

virtualization.info: Microsoft unlocks SQL Server 2005 license for virtualization: "In addition, Microsoft announced that it is expanding virtualization use rights to allow unlimited virtual instances on servers that are fully licensed for SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition. For customers who want maximum flexibility in their use of virtualization technology, now or in the future, SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition is the ideal choice."

Oracle to buy Hyperion in $3.3B deal

2007-03-01T06:11:00.000-08:00

Oracle to buy Hyperion in $3.3B deal: "Oracle Corp. said today it has agreed to acquire business intelligence software vendor Hyperion Solutions Corp. for $3.3 billion in cash.
Oracle said it will combine Hyperion's software with its own business intelligence and analytics tools to offer customers a broad range of performance management capabilities, including planning, budgeting and operational analytics. "

Defragmenting indexes in SQL Server 2005

2007-02-27T20:20:00.000-08:00

Defragmenting indexes in SQL Server 2005: "To defragment your indexes, we now use ALTER INDEX in SQL Server 2005 rather than DBCC DBREINDEX and DBCC INDEXDEFRAG, which have both been deprecated in 2005."

Microsoft OLAP by Mosha Pasumansky : OLAP Market Shares for 2006 - Microsoft is clear leader

2007-02-26T10:11:00.000-08:00

Microsoft OLAP by Mosha Pasumansky : OLAP Market Shares for 2006 - Microsoft is clear leader: "Nigel Pendse published his analysis for the OLAP market shares in 2006. The market overall grew at about 16%, but Microsoft OLAP again grew faster than the market. This time much faster - at about 30%, and as a result the Microsoft's share jumped up 4 points, (while pretty much everybody else lost market share, except for Microstrategy and Applix). Microsoft's numbers include all OLAP related income, such as portion of Excel's PivotTable and Business Scorecard Manager, but it is clear, that the main contributor behind such phenomenal growth was Analysis Services 2005. Released just before 2006 started, quickly followed by SP1 in April 2006 which fixed many known issues that were too risky to squeeze before RTM. In fact, work on SP1 started as early as August 2005, couple of month before AS2005 was even launched. Therefore it was SP2, (released 4 days ago), which provided the fixes for the previously unknown real-world problems encountered by the customers - both performance and functionality wise. Additionally, SP2 truly enabled Excel 2007 . So with AS2005 SP2 I feel really good about Analysis Services. Of course, there still will be some problems, and there will be fixes for them, and eventually sometime there will be SP3, but AS2005 SP2 is a mature, solid and proven piece of technology, and I expect it to do very well in 2007. "

Social SQL with FQL: the Facebook Query Language

2007-02-26T06:15:00.000-08:00

"FQL" - this is cool stuff!

ProgrammableWeb.com » Blog Archive » Social SQL with FQL: the Facebook Query Language: "SQL is going social with Facebook’s newly announced data access mechanism the Facebook Query Language. What is it? From their site:

Last week we released a whole new version of Platform. On the surface it may look similar to the old version, but under the hood it is a totally new implementation. And, starting today you can enjoy the benefits of that new implementation by getting direct access to a more powerful, flexible way of accessing Facebook data - a query language we call FQL…

FQL is a way to query the same Facebook data you can access through the other API functions, but with a SQL-style interface. In fact, many of the normal API calls are simple wrappers for FQL queries. All of the usual privacy checks are still applied. A typical query looks something like this:
SELECT name, pic FROM user WHERE uid=211031 OR uid=4801660 "

Database Mail on a cluster

2007-02-25T16:22:00.000-08:00

Database Mail on a cluster: "If you are unable to get Database Mail to send e-mails when the SQL Server 2005 instance is on a cluster, try adding an alias for the virtual server. You can easily add aliases using the SQL Server Configuration Manager tool."

SQL Server 2005 Dedicated Administrator Connection

2007-02-25T16:21:00.000-08:00

SQL Server 2005 Dedicated Administrator Connection: "This is a special diagnostic connection which is used by DBA's to troubleshoot a server when the server is refusing other connections
for whatever reason.
DAC can be created with SqlCmd utility or in SSMS with admin:instance_name."

How to Downgrade a Database from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2000

2007-02-25T16:20:00.000-08:00

How to Downgrade a Database from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2000: "I've seen this question pop up here, and i think it's usefull to post it here, since not every one reads the forums (you should! :))
We'll in this thread at the end of the first page there's a procedure on how to downgrade a db from SQL Server 2k5 to SQL server 2000.
Enjoy it."

Microsoft releases SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2

2007-02-23T09:38:00.000-08:00

Microsoft releases SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2: "Microsoft said it will allow unlimited virtual instances of the SQL Server SP2 database to run on servers that are fully licensed for SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition. "

Chris Webb's BI Blog: SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer CTP

2007-02-23T09:36:00.000-08:00

Chris Webb's BI Blog: SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer CTP: "I've just downloaded the CTP of the SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer (see Paul Mestemaker's post here http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlrem/archive/2007/02/21/SQL-2005-BPA-Feb-CTP-released.aspx for more details) and, shock horror, it analyses Analysis Services databases and Integration Services packages too! The advice it gives is quite sensible - things like 'set up attribute relationships' and 'put distinct count measures in their own measure group' - so it's definitely worth checking out. "

Business Intelligence Review

2007-02-23T05:16:00.000-08:00

Business Intelligence Review: "As businesses build these capabilities, one of the biggest challenges they face is the quality of the underlying data - a problem that costs companies worldwide billions every year. In February 2005, the research firm Forrester said 30 percent of the respondents to its latest data warehousing technology survey had actually missed deadlines in closing financial books and related statutory reporting due to information and data quality issues.3"

Business Intelligence Review

2007-02-23T05:12:00.000-08:00

Business Intelligence Review: "But it is safe to say that much of the data community prefers to steer wide of the process topic by and large. The biggest conferences are still largely data-centric, and the largest market research firm we know still segregates its BI and process events. Now that the weaknesses of tactical and operational business intelligence have been exposed, that mistake may not last long into the future."

MySQL Podcasts

2007-02-22T07:07:00.000-08:00

Leave it to MySQL to support these over Oracle and Microsoft... good stuff here, including security, clustering, and other things. Here;s my favorite:

Technocation - Podcasts: "OurSQL Episode 2: Wild Performance Tips 88 "

Tyro Trader: views of a market student: Google smackdown!

2007-02-19T06:24:00.000-08:00

Haven't written anything about IM bots in oh, about a year, but ran across this and it is quite nice. Google "gets it," and I'm continually impressed.

Tyro Trader: views of a market student: Google smackdown!: "Yet again, I'm blown away by how easy it is to work with Google! I've written code to tie into blogger.com and to Google Calendar and so I was already impressed. I decided to add alerts via Google Talk in case I'm not sitting at my desk and it was even easier than I could have guessed:

GoogleTalkConnection con = new GoogleTalkConnection();con.login('joesmith', 'password');con.createChat('maryjane@gmail.com') .sendMessage('Howdy!');

That's it! Incredible."

Mastering Enterprise BI: Time Intelligence Pt. I

2007-02-17T12:22:00.000-08:00

Mastering Enterprise BI: Time Intelligence Pt. I: "As I stated in my article Introduction to SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services: Handling Time Dimensions, it is a rare thing to encounter an instance of an OLAP cube that does not require a Time dimension. Throughout years of business intelligence consulting, I have only witnessed this scenario a handful of times within a production environment. Although there often seems to be no shortage of people to argue any side of any statement, few of us would disagree that the measurement of activity over time - and, hence, the Time dimension that supports this capability - is important to both analysis and operational management in general."

Massive Insider Breach At DuPont - News by InformationWeek

2007-02-16T06:28:00.000-08:00

Do you track who the most active database users are?

Massive Insider Breach At DuPont - News by InformationWeek: "Gary Min worked as a research chemist for DuPont for 10 years before accepting a job with DuPont competitor Victrex PLC in Asia in October 2005. Between August and December of that year, Min downloaded 22,000 sensitive documents and viewed 16,706 more in the company's electronic library, making him the most active user of that database in the company, according to prosecutors. "

"While many companies worry about departed employees stealing intellectual property through some sort of back door planted in their IT systems, 75% of the intellectual property thefts studied between 1996 and 2002 by the U.S. Secret Service and Carnegie Mellon's CERT program were committed by current employees, says Dawn Cappelli, a senior member of the technical staff at the CERT Program at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute. Of those current employees committing intellectual property thefts, 45% had already accepted a job offer with another company. "In between the time they have another offer and the time they leave is when they take the information," she says.

The best way to guard against insider breaches is for companies to monitor database and network access for unusual activity and set thresholds that represent acceptable use for different users. If an employee starts downloading thousands of documents, and this is unusual for the job designation, this should automatically trip red flags to an administrator or manager. "

Getting Real: Free Web 2.0 Book

2007-02-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

37 Signals has released a book that is a collection of essays about starting and running a Web 2.0 company. There are some gems in here, and it is worth browsing if you have any interest. The also sell PDF and paperbacks, but the content is available online for free.

Getting Real: "Getting Real
Here are the 16 chapters and 91 essays that make up the book."

Better Decision-Making: How Smart Companies Win with Performance Management

2007-02-07T16:20:00.000-08:00

Better Decision-Making: How Smart Companies Win with Performance Management: "How to Win in an Uncertain Economy "

SQL 2005 Maintenance Wizard Part 1

2007-02-07T08:11:00.000-08:00

SQL 2005 Maintenance Wizard Part 1: "There are a number of database housekeeping tasks that should be done on a regular basis to insure SQL performance and data integrity are optimized. Backing up the database, reorganizing data and index files, compressing the data file, updating the index statistics, and performing consistence checks are a few examples. All of these tasks can be executed using TSQL commands. However, SQL 2005 includes a graphical wizard (Maintenance Plan Wizard) that makes selecting these tasks and their options easy. In addition, the wizard will roll all of your selected tasks into a reusable and customizable package. "

Blogarithms » Amazon for Infrastructure-on-Demand

2007-02-05T11:31:00.000-08:00

Anyone who reads this blog know how cool I think Amazon web services are... here is a detailed, yet very cool example, with a diagram, of a website using all three.

Spend time on this if you want to know some of the future of computing...

Blogarithms » Amazon for Infrastructure-on-Demand: "The buzz is building around Amazon Web Services as an application platform. Don MacAskill has been using AWS’ S3 storage service for SmugMug, and according to Jeremy Zawodny, will be talking about it at this year’s ETech conference. Jeremy and others have been experimenting with S3 as storage backup for desktop and laptop systems. Even Dave Winer is experimenting with S3."

Data Stewards

2007-02-03T09:28:00.001-08:00

Data Stewards: "What is the role of a data steward?"

What is Really Behind the Success of Data Warehouse Appliances?

2007-02-03T09:28:00.000-08:00

What is Really Behind the Success of Data Warehouse Appliances?: "Over the past four years, data warehouse appliances have become a disruptive force in the data warehousing market, increasingly displacing systems built on traditional computing architectures. The market is characterized by tremendous growth, projected to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 70 percent through 2010, and its success is borne out by large brand-name companies worldwide, now numbering well over 100, who are implementing data warehouse appliances as a key component of their strategic business intelligence initiatives.1 According to Gartner, data warehouse appliances are projected for mainstream market adoption within two to five years. 2

But what is behind all this growth? Why are data warehouse appliances consistently able to outperform general-purpose systems to uncover deeply buried customer and operational trends? What accounts for their low total cost of ownership and ease of use in the data center?"

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide

2007-02-01T18:00:00.000-08:00

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide: "The AS2005 Performance Guide is available for download here: "

24/7 Wall St.: MySQL IPO May Be In The Works

2007-02-01T17:02:00.000-08:00

Any DBA out there will want a few shares of this... even it's just for kicks :) Be on the lookout.

24/7 Wall St.: MySQL IPO May Be In The Works: "MySQL is one of the companies we have had on the IPO-radar for some time, and even if this will take until the end of the year it is one to watch ahead of time."

The ABCs of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) - ITIL - CIO

2007-01-31T11:17:00.000-08:00

This is important.... it will impact the life of a DBA and will greatly increase you opportunities for advncement if you learn the lingo! ITIL is not going away...

The ABCs of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) - ITIL - CIO: "ITIL is a framework of best practices for delivering IT services. What's the big deal about it, and why is it considered so important in corporate computing? We explain the basics before you hunker down with the books."

Hiring Business Intelligence Professionals

2007-01-27T16:35:00.000-08:00

Hiring Business Intelligence Professionals: "The basic principles of supply and demand pertain to a company’s ability to recruit and retain business intelligence (BI) professionals. My company has been CONNECTing (forgive the pun) data warehousing and business intelligence professionals with consulting and employee positions since 1992. During this 15-year span, we have certainly experienced the cycles of both 1) more-demand-than-supply of qualified resources, and 2) more supply-than-demand of qualified resources. Based on predictions for 2007, get ready! Organizational demands for business intelligence capabilities will increase rapidly. This will make BI environments even more chaotic and the demands for hiring and retention even more significant. Good news for BI professionals that want to expand their careers!

To find and keep the best people, it takes an understanding of how to match the right person with the job – not just the one with the best technical skills. In their rush to fill open positions, managers can overlook that simple principle, resulting in a poor hire that causes more problems than it solves. There is also a tendency to hire people that remind us of ourselves rather than what the situation may really require. To get the best results, employers need a process that identifies employees who best fit your company based on facts, not just impressions."

Business Intelligence Review

2007-01-25T17:54:00.000-08:00

Business Intelligence Review: "The pyramid model of BI is completely inadequate for today's world of externalized business, computer-savvy workforces and constant communication. The concepts of hierarchical decision-making and solitary decision-making are simply not tenable in most cases. Problem solving and decision-making happen at every level of today's flattened and distributed organizations. The second word in the phrase business intelligence is, after all, intelligence. What does it mean to provide intelligence to people and operations? How do systems become intelligent? The enemy of intelligent systems and organization is stasis. Becoming intelligent involves collaboration, sharing and the ability to publish and modify analytical applications, not just data."

iTunes + Netflix = Cancel Cable? - Consumerist

2007-01-25T10:05:00.000-08:00

Good article... some commentary and my own experience with this on my new blog where I talk about this stuff more.

iTunes + Netflix = Cancel Cable? - Consumerist: "A blogger over at ZDNet realized that he could cancel part of his cable, order his shows on iTunes, watch movies on Netflix and save $300 a year.

Last week I came to the realization that with Netflix and iTunes, I would be able to cut out the $50 portion of my cable TV bill and ditch the 80 or so channels I never watch, including 3 shopping channels, 3 sports channels, 6 family channels, numerous foreign language channels, and one Lifetime Channel for Women that my fiance tortures me with. Farewell Melissa Gilbert, Rachael Ray, and Paula Deen! You are thus banished from my home!

I'm currently interested in about 6 shows, all of which it turns out I can get on iTunes. Plus, Netflix handles all of my movie needs. If I'm generous with my iTunes figures, it adds up to about $300 in purchases each year, versus the $600 I pay for all of the 'variety' that Comcast provides me. The old model of just piping junk into my home simply doesn't make sense to me anymore."

New Year, New You - Editorial - CIO

2007-01-23T17:35:00.000-08:00

Aspire to move up the ladder? This is a very good article...

New Year, New You - Editorial - CIO: "I speak to CIOs every day who confide that they would like their next opportunity to be something 'challenging' with a 'growing company' where they can provide 'leadership.' They have a generic understanding of what they want but no plan, no strategy, for achieving it. This never fails to amaze me. CIOs work so hard to be strategic in their technology leadership. Why not be strategic about your career?"

Data Migration: Plan to Succeed

2007-01-22T18:36:00.000-08:00

Data Migration: Plan to Succeed: "Before listing the specifics of what data migration entails, let us first define it in the context of data storage. Data migration is a one-time activity that is undertaken for a specific purpose. The purpose can vary from organization to organization, but it must justify the need to undertake the endeavor in the first place. Because any time you migrate data there is an element of risk to the business, if you find yourself migrating the same data all the time, you have other issues in the environment that warrant examination."

Building the Imperfect Data Warehouse

2007-01-22T18:28:00.000-08:00

Building the Imperfect Data Warehouse: "An imperfect data warehouse is one whose scope is something less than the enterprise. Instead, in a fit of practicality, the data warehouse is built for a subset of the data of the corporation. You know that there will be overlap and redundancy, but – in the interest of moving forward – you build a data warehouse anyway. "

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Microsoft Partners With Teradata In Business Intelligence

2007-01-21T11:41:00.000-08:00

This is a pretty big deal... Teradata has is very popular among the largest enterprises.

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Microsoft Partners With Teradata In Business Intelligence: "Microsoft plans to make its business intelligence software interoperable with Teradata's Enterprise Data Warehouse.

The two companies said they plan to work to offer integration between the Teradata product and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. The joint interoperability technologies are set for release by the end of the first quarter.

Microsoft Analysis Services is an OLAP server that provides a mechanism for delivering data to Microsoft analytic and reporting tools. The latest agreement means the analytic engine could work on top of the Teradata warehouse.

In addition, Microsoft and Teradata, which is a division of NCR that is being spun out into a standalone company, also plan to extend their interoperability efforts to include other Microsoft products, such as SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, and the 2007 Microsoft Office system. The latter includes Office Excel 2007, Windows SharePoint Services, and Office PerformancePoint Server 2007. "

Changes, new URL, etc. - OLAPBLOG.com

2007-01-21T11:27:00.000-08:00

I just haven't been spending as much time as I want to on the blog the last couple of months... there are a number of reasons, but for the readers still visiting or with me in their RSS readers, let me give you my biggest reason - the business I have been building for nearly 3 years, got up to 8 employees and marquee clients, sold December 1st. Obviously, this kept me busy :) getting operations integrated with the new company is also a challenge that will continue.

Meanwhile there are a couple of improvements. Most significantly, a domain name I bought a year ago with some flimsy hopes, OLAPBLOG.com, is now active with the new Blogger beta. The RSS feeds are from there, and that is where all traffic goes now. Pretty cool I think, to have that title, even if this has turned into mainly a link blog :)

Next, I plan to spend alot of my time blogging on a new blog under my own domain name about a whole range of other subjects, inclduing being an entrepreneur, selling a company, running a business, and IT trends I see and some opinion. With some luck i'll have some unique insights. I will be sure to post the URL here when I feel it is ready to start.

In the meantime, I hope you'll still find the info a place here valuable. With a new committment to blogging there should be more than in the recent past!

Changes to Daylight Savings Time in 2007 may affect your databases (DB2, Oracle and others)

2007-01-19T06:31:00.000-08:00

Changes to Daylight Savings Time in 2007 may affect your databases (DB2, Oracle and others): "In the United States the start and end of daylight savings times are being changed in 2007. Daylight savings time will now start on March 11, 2007 (rather than early April) and will end on November 4, 2007 (rather than late October). Canada has also decided to follow the same schedule. This may impact your databases so read on.

DB2, and other data servers, rely on the operating system clock to get the current date and time. There will of course be an operating system patch that you will have to apply to virtually all operating systems so that they will know of the time change. And internally, logs don't use time zone information (in DB2, Oracle or any other DB that I'm aware of) so there is no problem there. But there is one more issue to know about. Java SDK and JRE need a special patch. Without this patch your Java applications that work with timestamps will display the wrong time during the weeks of the changed DST. And if the Java application uses that time stamp (for scheduling purposes for example) they will behave incorrectly during this extended DST time. This includes your own Java Applications (and your JDBC applications) as well as the DB2 Control Center and Query Patroller.

Here is a link to more information and the patches that are available or will be available. This site also has links to the operating system patches for AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Windows, and Linux."

Blog changes...

2007-01-05T16:27:00.000-08:00

Testing some things... dont panic!

5 Disruptive Technologies To Watch In 2007 - News by InformationWeek

2007-01-03T06:40:00.000-08:00

5 Disruptive Technologies To Watch In 2007 - News by InformationWeek: "In 2006, we saw more buzzwords describing the 'Webification' of the enterprise. Software-as-a-service (SaaS), mashups, Web 2.0, RSS feeds, Wikis, blogs, the rewritable Web, social networking spaces, group chat rooms -- no matter which aspect you're talking about, clearly something new is happening here. The trick is paying attention, because the Web services movement is producing better and more capable enterprise class applications, which can be deployed in a fraction of the time that more traditional apps took.

IT managers are using the combinations of various Web-based applications to piece together what they need done. For example, you can now take a mapping service such as Yahoo or Google Maps and tie in the location of your current sales leads to determine where to deploy your sales force. Many of these begin with one or more hosted applications and build from there. For some leading-edge examples, look at Zimbra for hosting enterprise-class e-mail, Amazon's S3 for offsite disk storage, basecamp.com for project management, Concur for expense reporting, and Jive Software's Clearspace for document and workflow management. All mix multiple applications using well-known, and, in most cases, open-source code. "

Keep an Open Eye » Open Source Database Designer

2006-12-29T06:51:00.000-08:00

Keep an Open Eye » Open Source Database Designer: "Fabforce.net has produced a very practical database designer utility that allows users to create EREntity Relationship database model diagrams either from scratch or reverse engineered from existing databases. The types of databases that DBDesigner natively connects to includes MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and a host of desktop databases through ODBC. The screenshot shows the tool in action with MySQL WordWeb database data (this is a very nifty database of over 100,000 English words) ."

SQL Server 2005 Jobs

2006-12-15T09:05:00.000-08:00

SQL Server 2005 Jobs: "I then checked the Application Log for the 2005 job failures since that is what MOM uses. I noticed that when a 2005 job failed, it wasn’t reported in the Application Log.
In SQL Server 2000, by default, the “Write to Windows application event log” “When the job fails” option is checked in the 'Notifications' tab when you create a job in Enterprise Manager.
In SQL Server 2005, this option is not checked by default."

Microsoft TechNet: Microsoft SQL Server TechCenter - Best Practices

2006-12-14T15:12:00.000-08:00

Microsoft TechNet: Microsoft SQL Server TechCenter - Best Practices: "SQL Server - Best Practices
Get the real-world guidelines, expert tips, and rock-solid guidance to take your SQL Server implementation to the next level. Drawing on the extensive experience and expertise from respected developers and engineers at Microsoft as they walk you through the specifics on solving particularly difficult issues."

The Five W's of Database Restores

2006-11-30T14:56:00.000-08:00

The Five W's of Database Restores: "The things that need to be considered fall into five different categories: Who, What, When, Where and Why. I will discuss each one of these categories and how to use the five W's to help guide you in making the right choices when performing a database restore."

Your 2007 Head Check: Seven New Business Intelligence Gotchas

2006-11-30T14:21:00.000-08:00

Your 2007 Head Check: Seven New Business Intelligence Gotchas: "IT is doing the wrong kind of spending. Trust me on this one: your IT management is still more focused on platforms (their cost, their maintenance, their uptime, their outsourcing) than it is on corporate data. And the quality of IT spending these days leaves a lot to be desired, with many investments focusing more on short-term fixes rather than long-term solutions. The best CIOs are those who see the rest of the company as the customer. These CIOs constantly measure and proselytize the business value of their IT initiatives. "

erp4it: DBMS configuration management

2006-11-29T19:40:00.000-08:00

Wow some vey highly paid people agonising over this... a waste of salaries.

erp4it: DBMS configuration management: "I am in search of information specifically related to database 'instance' configuration management. Any information/opinions would be great. To be precise, what I mean by 'instance' would be the configuration of, say, Oracle 10gr2 or Sybase ASE 15 that is mounted on a host OS (e.g. on HP-UX 11.11). Let me explain: What we are being solicited for by our large user base is management (e.g. large scale global management) of the database software that is mounted on specific types of 'boxes'. "

Amazon Web Services Success Stories

2006-11-29T06:53:00.000-08:00

These fascinate me... and these services will only drop in price over time.

Amazon Web Services Success Stories: "We have written before about the innovative Amazon Web Services Platform. This stack was officially announced by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos during the recent Web 2.0 summit and is now considered part of the core business strategy for Amazon. While analysts, competitors and Wall Street are pondering what to make of this move from a business sense, in this post we look at who is utilizing Amazon Web Services - and how. This post is based on personal communication with those people, along with the set of success stories available on the Amazon Web Services site."

More Data - Priceline's Dashboards - Editorial - CIO

2006-11-21T12:41:00.000-08:00

More - Editorial - CIO: "Generally speaking, those 70,000 data points are monitored on a real-time IT system dashboard. The company has been testing new dashboards that offer up-to-the-second information and correlation analysis on numerous systems, including the state of the plumbing and network operations; CPU utilization; various application metrics (how much time is needed to transfer data within the system); Oracle database performance; BMC-monitored performance of things like I/O utilization; operating system paging (how much data is moving to and from the systems disks; and if the operating system is running out of RAM to work with) and a whole lot more. All those metrics (and more) are crucial to Priceline's business as illustrated by a recent Harris Interactive consumer study that found that 40 percent of online consumers will abandon their transaction (or turn to a competitor) if their initial attempt to interact with a site is foiled."

Microsoft Aims High on Data Warehouses

2006-11-21T09:25:00.000-08:00

This has always been the #1 limiter for SQL in enterprise environments... can the hating stop? Then again, after claiming SQL can't handle larger databases, what else does the competition truly have on SQL Server?

Microsoft Aims High on Data Warehouses: "November 20, 2006 (Computerworld) --
SEATTLE -- Once characterized by its rivals as a database featherweight punching above its weight class, Microsoft Corp. last week said it plans to build two mammoth data warehouses based on its year-old SQL Server 2005 software.

At the annual conference of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) user group, Microsoft said it is designing a 270TB multinode data warehouse for a foreign government that it declined to identify. The software vendor is also working on a 162TB single-node installation for its own marketing department. "

“They can scale and handle data warehouses of any size; we know that now,” said Donald Feinberg, an analyst at Gartner Inc. “I routinely talk to SQL Server customers that have built 7TB data warehouses or Windows Datacenter [systems] with 3,000 users.”

Oracle RAC Administration - Part 9: Hands on administration

2006-11-21T09:19:00.000-08:00

Oracle RAC Administration - Part 9: Hands on administration: "This is a typical placement error that I get on every installation. I think it may have to do with the time issue; we will come to that. If you are using an ESX server to test/develop your RAC, then the information to test and fix your time synchronization issues will certainly come very handy. "

The 30 Most Important IT Trends for 2007

2006-11-21T09:17:00.000-08:00

Interesting list...

The 30 Most Important IT Trends for 2007: "22. The move to a new architecture marches on
23. Enterprise applications start losing their luster
24. Data quality demands attention
25. IT reluctantly embraces Web 2.0
26. IT innovation loses traction
27. Business process management services and software will frustrate users
28. For business intelligence, the best is yet to come
29. IT organizations start going green
30. Dissatisfaction with vendors is on the rise"