Sybase

I am not anticipating any new Sybase ASE version before this summer. None are announced. This is due to the massive efforts of certifying SAP R/3 on Sybase ASE, which is expected by the end of Q2. There were many joined events between SAP and Sybase since Sybase’s acquisition by SAP. The most notable is SAP TechED. The latest was in Berlin and drew a lot of interest, especially into Sybase mobility as well as Sybase IQ and ASE.

This year Sybase TechWave 2011 will be hosted within the SAP TechED USA in Las Vegas. This is the much needed boost for Sybase to a larger audience.

Sybase IQ 15.3 is expected to be released soon. The beta tests are going for quite a while. The highlight for Sybase IQ 15.3 is the PlexQ Distributed Query Platform, a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture that accelerates highly complex queries by distributing work to many computers in a grid configuration.

Sybase IQ 15.3 PlexQ Distributed Query Platform solution offers the following benefits:

• Extreme performance: enables users to harness the power of multiple compute resources in a Sybase IQ PlexQ environment to simultaneously execute queries across the grid. This is the next step after Sybase IQ 15 introduced multiple writers in the multiplex grid.
• Increased scalability: empowers system managers to easily and cost effectively scale out Sybase IQ PlexQ nodes with commodity hardware and managing SLAs in a high demand environment.
• Architectural flexibility: allows system managers to quickly and easily group subsets of compute resources as logical entities. This allows DBA to effectively utilize workload balancing and resource sharing.

2011 will be a very interesting year for Sybase and as I stated many times before, SAP made all the difference. Sybase is on its way back to gaining market shares as well as market interest.

Click here to read more about Sybase IQ.

Oracle

No, Oracle 12g is not here, yet. There is little or no information available on this topic. The only leaked information so far is that raw devices will no longer be supported. Well, you saw this coming, right? With the maturity of ASM you will probably skip raw devices even sooner.

Let’s focus on the latest release 11g R2. Many of the new features are focused on the cluster.

Single-Instance RAC: This will replace the custom DBSTART scripting DBAs had to do to automatically start all the Oracle instances upon system start. This will implement the restart features every node in a cluster is accustom to.

Cluster Time Synchronization Service: Synchronizing system times across all RAC nodes can be a chore. If you’ve ever experienced a node eviction within a Real Application Cluster database’s cluster configuration, you know how difficult it can be to tie together the train of events that caused the eviction.

ASM: Many new features that offers better support for clusterware.

ACFS: The ASM Clustered File System is the successor of the OCFS and the OCFS2. This allows for better management of the voting disk in a RAC configuration.

Improvements to software installation and patching: The previously standalone Cluster Verification Utility (CVU) is now integrated into the Oracle Universal Installer. Plus there is a new zero-downtime patching for clusterware.

There are several performance improvement features in 11g R2, especially for data warehouse environments.

These include:

• Instance “Caging”
• Automatic Degree of Parallelism
• Parallel Data Cache: In-Memory Execution.
• Faster Refreshes of Materialized Views

Data Guard: New disaster recovery options and better standby database management.

All these improvements and new features are part of the paradigm shift of Oracle that moves the database management closer toward a self-tuning, self-managed and self-healing database system.

Click here to read more about Oracle 11g R2

SQL Server

After 2 releases of SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft is releasing the new SQL Server 2011, code name Denali. At a first glance this is a developer’s release. Many new features are geared to better support SQL developers and a better integration into Visual Studio is also a key improvement.

Here are some of the new features:

Multi-Subnet Failover Clustering: This feature allows to geographically separate cluster nodes to provide disaster recovery and high availability. This feature depends on Windows Server failover cluster.

Sequences: Oracle style sequences for unique key value generation. Finally!

Query Paging: This is a feature that MySQL offers for years and now SQL Server is offering as well. Paging through result sets has some distinct performance advantages and simplifies coding efforts for developers.

The most significant change is the drop of DTS package support. This is not actually an announced feature, but an observation within SQL Server Management Studio. The Data Transformation Services menu option under the Legacy section has been removed. I think it is time for the hold outs to convert their old DTS packages to SSIS.

A little side note, SQL Server Management Studio now offers support for multi-screen environments.

Click here to download a trial of SQL Server 2011

Conclusion

Here you have it, a potpourri of new database technologies across vendors and systems. I hope you found something of interest to you and as always, please leave feedback.

Until next time,

Peter Dobler

The post Database Trends 2011 appeared first on Dobler Consulting.

Below is the press release about ActiveBase’s inclusion into Gartner’s Cool Vendor list 2010.

April 18 2010 | Tel Aviv, Israel

ActiveBase, a pioneer in the Dynamic Data Masking market through its ActiveBase Security™ solution, today announced it has been included in the list of Gartner Cool Vendors in the Cool Vendors in Application Security, 2010 report by Ray Wagner, Joseph Feiman, Neil MacDonald, John Pescatore, Earl Perkins April 14, 2010, by Gartner Inc.

While other security and static data masking tools may provide protection for non-production environments, sensitive information in production environments remains mainly unprotected. With ActiveBase, users, external workforce, IT support teams or outsourced personnel cannot access sensitive information if it is not required to perform their job. ActiveBase offers a new approach – Dynamic Data Masking – allowing for application transparent, flexible protection even within packaged applications.

ActiveBase Security™ is the first product on the market in the emerging Dynamic Data Masking market. Static data masking — the only approach offered by most vendors — primarily aims to deter the misuse of data by users of test databases (typically programmers, testers and database administrators) by masking data in advance of testing.

Dynamic (real-time) data masking typically masks data in production databases (for example, from client service personnel working in credit-card call centers).

This technology does not require any changes in applications that access the database, or to the database itself. A caching mechanism minimizes performance effects.

The power of Dynamic Data Masking solution is that it adds a security layer within and around  business applications, reporting, development and database tools, masking, scrambling, hiding or blocking sensitive information in real-time with no changes to applications or databases, while the underlying data is not masked, but it is returned masked at the presentation layer.

ActiveBase Security™ benefits include:

• Dynamically masks, scrambles, blocks, encrypts or hides “in-motion” access to sensitive and personal information in 1/10 the costs and time of applying other solutions.
• Enforces application security policies across applications and tools accessing production database. No need for changes to the applications or the database.
• Reuses ActiveBase Security production rules to mask and protect unauthorized access in testing and QA environments.
• Administered by security operators that are not required to be DBAs.

About Gartner’s Cool Vendors Selection Process

Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

About ActiveBase

ActiveBase, Ltd. is a pioneer in the Dynamic Data Masking market through its ActiveBase Security™ solution and performance suite. World leading customers including Coca Cola, GE, Orange, Phoenix Insurance, First international Bank, Israeli Security agency and many more trust our software products in the most demanding environments.

Our software products are built on a patented Database Network Router (DNR) technology, transparently installed between applications and databases, with database traffic routed through it.

ActiveBase was founded 2002 by senior IT industry executives with specific expertise in enterprise security and database performance. ActiveBase is privately held. For more information, please visit http://www.active-base.com or http://www.dynamicdatamasking.com

###
More information about ActiveBase can be found on http://www.dynamic-db.com and http://www.doblerconsulting.com .

Thank you for reading,

Peter Dobler

The post Leading Industry Analyst Firm Names ActiveBase “Cool Vendor” appeared first on Dobler Consulting.

The past few years were dominated by all major database vendors introducing and improving their database cluster products. There is the bread of shared nothing clusters like Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and there are the share everything clusters like Oracle and Sybase. You can read all about this in my previous post “Grid Databases – The Future of Database Technology?“.

It is amazing how far these technologies have come and how much we got used to “always available” databases. You know what’s coming next. Now, that we have uninterrupted access to data, it would be great if we get the data faster. Well, the database vendors have an answer for that as well.

It was about 7 years ago when I first was introduced into the concept of in-memory databases. At the time it was less known database vendor called Times-Ten that offered an in-memory database with blazing performance metrics, hence times ten. It was the perfect answer to solid state disk drives that could drain an IT budget in a hurry.

Apparently this technology was so intriguing that Oracle decided to buy Times Ten and make it Oracle’s in-memory database. The only downside to this is, it is not an Oracle database in memory, it is Times Ten’s engine running in memory. This creates admin nightmares to have special skills to manage the Times Ten engine in addition to the Oracle server, as well as different software development techniques for both systems. Performance gains out weight manageability concerns, I guess?

Just recently Sybase announced its Sybase ASE server, in version 15.5, will have an in-memory engine equivalent that will provide the same functionality and manageability as the standard Sybase ASE server. This is a remarkable step, because it provides performance gains transparent to client applications and the database engine will not challenge DBAs to learn new skills. To me this is a win-win situation.

Microsoft is still in the planning and rumor phase of providing an in-memory database for its next version of SQL Server. The code name for the next SQL Server upgrade is Kilimanjaro. This is the name to use when searching for upgrade information. It is not clear when the new SQL Server release will be available and it is not clear if it will be named SQL Server 2010. It depends if it gets out this year or not.

IBM has its own in-memory database for DB2 and I believe it is a Java based and Java supporting engine. I have to admit that I’m not as fluent with DB2 as I wish to and please add your comments to this post if you’re a DB2 expert.

Having listed all the in-memory contenders, the question pops up “What about Sybase IQ?” or any other data warehouse database for that matter, Terradata and Netezza for example.

The answer lies in the architecture of in-memory databases. They are designed to improve transaction processing volume, the classic OLTP applications. Data warehouses would not have any benefits from in-memory databases. In-memory databases provide extreme high-speed transaction processing without the need to confirm disk write success. Traditional databases have one thing they have to do to ensure data integrity. They all need to wait for the disk i/o to confirm a write to disk. Database vendors came up with very complex and sophisticated caching techniques to overcome this performance challenge. But they cannot ignore this fundamental requirement.

In-memory database bypass this disk writing requirement and that’s what improves the speed. Designed for high volume transaction systems, like e-commerce shopping carts, in-memory databases are unbeatable when it comes to writing transaction data. And this is fundamentally different to data caching of traditional database engines. Data caching improves read performance, but does nothing to improve write performance.
There is a downside to these databases as well; they offer alternatives to performance problems in poorly written applications. Like powerful hardware, in-memory database have the potential to mask poor application development. We might see an explosion of in-memory database implementations due to this matter.

Bottom-line: this is cutting edge technology that will give database architects another tool in the toolbox to design the most effective database environment. Do yourself a favor and try to get your hands at a test environment to experience this technology first hand. Yes, 2010 could be the year of in-memory databases.

Thanks for listening,
Peter

The post 2010 – The Year of In-Memory Databases? appeared first on Dobler Consulting.

Microsoft SQL Server 2010

Just last year in August we were introduced to SQL Server 2008, which finally brought us backup compression and data compression amongst many other new features. Many SQL Server customers are still recovering from the SQL Server 2005 migration and find it difficult to keep up with this breath taking speed of new releases.

So what’s new in SQL Server 2010?

It will build on the data warehouse improvement of SQL Server 2008 and adds even more support for multi terabyte databases.

The main focus of SQL Server 2010 will be on “managed self services”. Self tuning will be achieved by interpreting the Dynamic Management Views (DMV). Is this the death of the DBA? Not at all, it will redefine the skills and duties of a DBA in the day to day operations. But then again, let’s see if and how this works.

Emphasis on policies is another big change. Many policies are already available since SQL Server 2005, but in SQL Server 2010 they will be enforced by default.

The last improvement is focused on better email integration and integration into the Web 2.0 environment. Imagine; SQL Server goes Twitter.

After all, these are preliminary information available through some rumor mills and a little bit from the Microsoft website. One thing is for sure, with the release of SharePoint 2010 (beta available now), SQL Server 2010 will become even more important.

I’m pretty sure that there will be more information available soon.

Oracle 12g

Yes, you heard right. Oracle 12g is around the corner. There is not much information available on this new release. The only detail that leaked so far is that Oracle 12g won’t support raw filesystems anymore. This is bad news for RAC environments. The OCR and the voting disk relay on raw filesystems via CFS like OCFS.

The word is that ASM will step in and close the gap in 12g. Also, more emphasis on NFS will be placed as well.

Other than that, there’s not much information regarding functionality enhancements available. As soon as I get more details I will post it.

Sybase is not in the radar to release yet another major release in the near future. The focus is on synchronizing the ASE 15.0.3 release with the Sybase ASE CE (Cluster Edition) version. There is also a new project that will replace Sybase Central with a web based management tool. The ASE (standard and cluster edition) is already available.

Sybase just released a couple of major new releases in their product line, Sybase IQ 15, Sybase Replication Server 15 and Sybase ASE Cluster Edition mid last year. There are new major releases in planning, but not released in the near future like Microsoft and Oracle. That’s at least to my knowledge. One thing is remarkable with Sybase; they had the best quarter in Q1 of 2009 and I can’t wait to get the results for Q2.

One thing is always interesting to observe. This constant competition and the need to outperform drive these vendors to constantly push the envelope and we as the consumer will get better, faster and cheaper products.

The downside is that we have to constantly upgrade our systems. Over time this creates enormous strains on IT staff and budgeting. It seems that the pace of new major database releases has picked up noticable and it remains up to the IT managers to make the right call at the right time. The current cutting in staff and budgets is no help either.

Database vendors are packing more and more value added features into their systems to gain more customers and sell their product. Hopefully we will see a speedy recovery of the economy to enable these companies to bring back staff and put all these great features to work soon.

Thanks,

Peter Dobler

The post Database Technology Roadmap 2009 And Beyond appeared first on Dobler Consulting.

What these engineers didn’t understand was how database engines worked at the time and how they actually set the trends for hardware development. The database engines were calling for Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) systems that offered dozens of CPUs in one single server platform. Just when we thought the mainframe was dead – with grid computing, we witnessed the birth of the open systems mainframe.
To offset these MPP systems, software architects created a middleware layer to get away from these monsters. Now we have these MPP systems in the center of the universe and all these middleware servers dancing around them.

For years to come, companies filled their data centers with hundreds of middleware servers and dozens of MPP systems. Cooling and power supplies were running at their peak and data center managers didn’t know how to support this hardware excess into the future.

This became the birthplace of server virtualization. Within a few years, server virtualization became the main focus for every company searching for infrastructure savings. Consolidating middleware servers was an easy task and a huge success story shared with pride by the project managers.

But one area was not so successful in consolidating hardware. MPP systems didn’t go away quietly. It turned out that the database systems were too much to handle for the server virtualization frenzy. Yes, countless efforts have been undertaken to move the databases off these monsters, but the virtual world couldn’t provide the performance needed to support the databases.

Remember our grid computing story? The vision of sharing an army of small computers to produce the same computing power as the massive MPP systems seemed lost forever. Until the ugly truth about MPP systems became obvious. Running huge MPP systems are not only energy intensive, but the associated maintenance costs are also burdensome. Buying a replacement MPP system was the only option. However, spending money got increasingly tight over the past several years. This all became a Catch-22.  You needed to spend more to increase your costs!

Database vendors to the rescue: grid database technology seems to be the way out of under the massive weight of these MPP systems. Take a couple of low-cost powerful dual or quad core servers and spread the workload over multiple servers. Not only do you get instant high availability, but you gain added scalability beyond your MPP platform’s physical limitations. There are two major methodologies in achieving grid databases; shared everything and shared nothing.

The shared everything category is dominated by Oracle and Sybase. Both systems are able to instantly failover database processes should one participating server go down, aka. high availability. And both can dynamically scale their CPU power by adding more servers to the grid, and both systems can balance the workload among all participating servers. Oracle RAC and Sybase ASE-Cluster Edition are the most sophisticated systems available today. If you want to squeeze the maximum out of your existing hardware or if you are seeking to replace energy-wasting and maintenance-fee-eating MPP monsters, these two databases are the weapons of choice.

The second methodology is shared nothing. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Federation Data Store represents the leader in this category. Unlike the shared everything technology, the shared nothing approach has a clear distinction between local and global data. The data federation approach allows combining data stored locally on multiple individual databases. It acts as an aggregator of multiple databases. This is not as sophisticated as the shared everything approach, but it gets the job done as well.

There’s a third contender, Sybase IQ Multiplex. This system uses a hybrid approach, shared data, but no shared cache. This is very unique and no other database vendor has anything like it. Sybase IQ is Sybase’s data warehouse engine. A column-vector database that set new performance benchmark records by having just one distinctive writer node in the cluster and a nearly unlimited number of reader nodes.  But there’s a caution: Never try to run an OLTP application on this system. This system is built for data warehousing and massive analytical reporting, a perfect match for data hungry BI tools.

There are a couple of other database vendors that are offering grid database technology of some flavor. This article is not meant to create a competitive analysis between all of these systems, but a starting point to get your imagination going. The bottom-line is that preserving energy becomes more and more important and software vendors are providing solutions to maximize low-cost and low-energy consuming hardware. The future belongs to grid databases.

The post Grid Databases – The Future of Database Technology? appeared first on Dobler Consulting.

This blog is designed to provide information about database technology trends and more importantly database implementation best practices.

My area of expertise are Sybase ASE, Sybase IQ, Sybase Replication Server, Oracle 8i, 9i, 10g and 11g and SQL Server 2000,2005.

The post Welcome appeared first on Dobler Consulting.