Beginning with DB2 10.1 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows, DB2 has supported RDF data and SPARQL application development. In this article, learn about important enhancements for RDF application development that were added in DB2 10.1 Fix Pack 2.

Are you wondering where to find the information you need to learn about and start using the real-time monitoring information available in the DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows product? This article sets out a path through the documentation that will help you deal with this question by providing direct links to the appropriate topics in the Information Center.

The DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows data compression feature allows you to store your data in a compact form. There are two known benefits of this approach: first, reduction of storage space, and second, improvement of performance. In this article we describe a case study showing the third benefit: reduction of electricity consumption per unit of work. As a result, data compression reduces the cost of database maintenance and makes your database greener.

Installation of DB2 10 requires configuring z/OS Storage Management Subsystem (SMS) for DB2 system objects, and migrating the system data sets to SMS to exploit its benefits. Since the migration to DB2 10 is possible from DB2 8, some customers, upon reaching DB2 10 new-function mode (NFM), can benefit from many features related to z/OS SMS, including those introduced in DB2 9. This article will help you in reorganizing DB2 catalog and directory objects.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released a security update to all current versions of the PostgreSQL database system, including versions 9.2.3, 9.1.8, 9.0.12, 8.4.16, and 8.3.23. This update fixes a denial-of-service (DOS) vulnerability. All users should update their PostgreSQL installations as soon as possible.

The security issue fixed in this release, CVE-2013-0255, allows a previously authenticated user to crash the server by calling an internal function with invalid arguments. This issue was discovered by independent security researcher Sumit Soni this week and reported via Secunia SVCRP, and we are grateful for their efforts in making PostgreSQL more secure.

Today's update also fixes a performance regression which caused a decrease in throughput when using dynamic queries in stored procedures in version 9.2. Applications which use PL/pgSQL's EXECUTE are strongly affected by this regression and should be updated. Additionally, we have fixed intermittent crashes caused by CREATE/DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY, and multiple minor issues with replication.

This release is expected to be the final update for version 8.3, which is now End-of-Life (EOL). Users of version 8.3 should plan to upgrade to a later version of PostgreSQL immediately. For more information, see our Versioning Policy.

This update release also contains fixes for many minor issues discovered and patched by the PostgreSQL community in the last two months, including:

• Prevent unnecessary table scans during vacuuming
• Prevent spurious cached plan error in PL/pgSQL
• Allow sub-SELECTs to be subscripted
• Prevent DROP OWNED from dropping databases or tablespaces
• Make ECPG use translated messages
• Allow PL/Python to use multi-table trigger functions (again) in 9.1 and 9.2
• Fix several activity log management issues on Windows
• Prevent autovacuum file truncation from being cancelled by deadlock_timeout
• Make extensions build with the .exe suffix automatically on Windows
• Fix concurrency issues with CREATE/DROP DATABASE
• Reject out-of-range values in to_date() conversion function
• Revert cost estimation for large indexes back to pre-9.2 behavior
• Make pg_basebackup tolerate timeline switches
• Cleanup leftover temp table entries during crash recovery
• Prevent infinite loop when COPY inserts a large tuple into a table with a large fillfactor
• Prevent integer overflow in dynahash creation
• Make pg_upgrade work with INVALID indexes
• Fix bugs in TYPE privileges
• Allow Contrib installchecks to run in their own databases
• Many documentation updates
• Add new timezone "FET".

As with other minor releases, users are not required to dump and reload their database or use pg_upgrade in order to apply this update release; you may simply shut down PostgreSQL and update its binaries. Users who have skipped multiple update releases may need to perform additional, post-update steps; see the Release Notes for details.

Links:

• Download
• Release Notes

Hello SQL Server community! My name is Eron Kelly and I recently took the role of General Manager of Product Marketing for the Data Platform at Microsoft. I’ve been at Microsoft for over 12 years in various product marketing roles on BizTalk, Exchange, Office 365 and Windows Azure. I’m excited that my first blog post in my new role is to announce Microsoft’s positioning as a Leader the Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems that was published on January 31, 2013.

First off, thank you to all the customers who spoke to Gartner on our behalf for this Magic Quadrant. Your engagement with us on SQL Server has made it a better product for data warehousing, and we believe that our position in the Leaders Quadrant in this report reflects the core values of our platform: ease of use, high scale, high availability and market leading TCO. This placement recognizes our strategy to provide customers with data warehouses of all sizes – from the mid-market to the largest mission critical, tier one deployments – that have the best price for performance in market.

This is different from the approach of other vendors in the data warehousing space, who can deliver similar performance at a much higher price. Customers, like Hy-Vee who saw a 100X query performance improvement, or AMD who adds a terabyte of data to their data warehouse each week, are seeing great performance with the SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse Appliance.

We are pleased that Gartner has recognized us as a leader in Data Warehouse Database Management Systems and that customers are affirming our approach. In the coming year, we will continue to focus on delivering the highest value to our customers through innovations in mission critical scale, performance, and high availability while continuing to deliver on lowering the total cost of ownership of the data platform. Thank you for your continued support and I look forward to talking with you more in the future.

Eron Kelly
General Manager
SQL Server

* Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Management Tool Engineered for Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Reduces Steps Required for Data Protection and Secondary Processing by 88 Percent1 /us/corporate/press/1904809 en

London, UK, 4th February 2013 - Actian Corp. (“Actian”), a leader in next generation big data management, today announced that Differentia Consulting has signed a reseller agreement with the company to offer enterprises the benefits of Actian Vectorwise, the innovative, record-breaking analytic database for big data.

Active since 2002, Differentia Consulting provides consulting, solutions, resourcing, support and training services to its clients and is a leading QlikView Solution Provider in Europe. Differentia Consulting has chosen to offer Actian Vectorwise to reply to the demand from its QlikView clients who want to go beyond the confines of the technology and now analyze and report on bigger, more complex data sets.

With Actian Vectorwise, Differentia Consulting can now offer its customers a joint solution of QlikView and Vectorwise that allows its clients to broaden their analytics and benefit from better performance and simplicity.

Previously, in very high data volume scenarios, users had to build and manage numerous linked QlikView documents supported by QVD files. These QVD files are a local QlikView data storage mechanism and in order to achieve the required performance with very large data sets it was necessary to create a hierarchy of aggregation. This approach is less than ideal as it introduces constraints in the flexibility of the analysis possible.

QlikView now incorporates Direct Discovery functionality which permits it to leverage the very high performance of the Vectorwise database for calculating aggregates on-the-fly over very large datasets. This approach removes the requirement to build pre-calculated aggregates within QVDs and permits the highly flexible analysis approach which has made QlikView so popular.

Differentia Consulting believes that Vectorwise offers a superior level of manageability, simplicity as well as analytic performance when compared to other database solutions. Furthermore, thanks to the QlikView Direct Discovery functionality, users can extend their use of QlikView applications by implementing Actian Vectorwise as the underlying analytic database in high volume usage cases that demand; speed, agility and system governance.

“I see Vectorwise as the enabler of Big Data access from our clients’ perspective. We needed an analytic database that we could offer our clients where large data volumes were making deploying QlikView non viable. For us, Vectorwise was the logical solution; being agile and rapid is key,” commented Adrian Parker, vice-president strategy and marketing at Differentia Consulting.

“Differentia Consulting is a key solution provider in the European BI marketplace and has been successful in helping businesses benefit from QlikView technology,” commented Sean Jackson, marketing director EMEA at Actian. “By offering Vectorwise, Differentia Consulting is now extending their reach and helping more enterprises benefit from faster and simpler big data analytics and reporting. No longer do QlikView users need to be constrained by the amount of data they can analyze; with Vectorwise, the amount of data can grow exponentially, which means that users can analyze and report on more data than ever before. We look forward to working with Differentia Consulting to take this proposition to the QlikView installed base.”

About Actian: Take Action on Big Data
Actian Corporation enables organizations to transform big data into business value with data management solutions to transact, analyze, and take automated action across their business operations. Actian helps 10,000 customers worldwide take action on their big data with Action Apps, Vectorwise, the analytical database, and Ingres, an independent mission-critical OLTP database. Actian is headquartered in California with offices in New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Melbourne. Stay connected with Actian Corporation on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Actian, Cloud Action Platform, Action Apps, Ingres and Vectorwise are trademarks of Actian Corporation. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

About Differentia Consulting
Differentia Consulting has provided consulting, solutions, resourcing, support and training services to many different clients since 2002. The company is a long-standing partner of IBM and Oracle with JD Edwards, and a QlikView Elite Solution Provider with QlikView customers from all sectors and core technologies (JD Edwards, Oracle, SAP, Infor, IFS, Microsoft, SAGE, Siebel, SalesForce, SugarCRM etc). Differentia Consulting has an ERP heritage; however, the company has expanded into the agile analytics space both from a software resale and value-add consulting perspective. For more information, go to www.differentia.co

Contact:
Jamie Stevenson
Axicom
Jamie.stevenson@axicom.com
t:  02083924095
m: 07769640202

New database release provides performance and scalability gains

Curious about the differences in approaching performance and scalability in SQL Server vs. Windows Azure SQL Database (formerly SQL Azure)? Check out this new paper that brings together insights from the Microsoft SQL Engineering and Customer Advisory Teams (CAT) to detail the differences between on-premises SQL Server and Azure SQL Database tuning and monitoring techniques and best practices for database performance testing. If you’re an on-premises SQL Server whiz and currently integrating the cloud or considering a move to Platform as a Service, this paper is a must read!

Paper Overview

While SQL Server and Windows Azure SQL Databases have large and important similarities, they are not identical, and while the differences are relatively small, they affect the way that applications perform on SQL Database compared to SQL Server. As a result, the application architecture and performance evaluation techniques for each platform also differ.

This document explains these performance differences and their causes and includes real-world customer wisdom from experience troubleshooting performance on production customer SQL Databases. This document also examines common SQL Server performance evaluation techniques that do not work on SQL Database.

Read the full paper.

Oracle Announces General Availability of MySQL 5.6 -- New Version of the World’s Most Popular Open Source Database Designed to Power Next Generation Web, Cloud and Mobile Applications /us/corporate/press/1904335 en

New Version of the World’s Most Popular Open Source Database Designed to Power Next Generation Web, Cloud and Mobile Applications

Greg Larsen explores the new SQL Server 2012 date and time functions and shows you how to exploit these functions in new application code.

Choosing proper partitioning keys is important for optimal query performance in IBM DB2 Enterprise Server Edition for Linux, UNIX, and Windows environments with the Database Partitioning Feature (DPF). To help with this task, this article provides new routines to estimate data skews for existing and new partitioning keys. The article also details best practices and shows how to change a partitioning key while keeping the table accessible.

A IBM Cognos 10 SDK application that will merge reports created in Report Studio. This application will work with IBM Cognos 10 BI versions 10.1.x and 10.2.

How Twitter Stores 250M Tweets a Day Using MySQL (High Scalability) -- notes from a talk at the MySQL conference on how Twitter built a high-volume MySQL store. How The Atlantic Got Profitable With Digital First (Mashable) -- Lauf says his team has focused on putting together premium advertising experiences that span print, digital, events and (increasingly) mobile. Data...

Whenever I talk about Membase with candidates, employees, or friends, I feel more and more excited about what we are building and how it is going to impact the industry. Each discussion validates my belief that what we do *is* unique and a game changer.

Just today, we had two important “wins,” one from a prospect who evaluated our technology against other NoSQL databases and chose Membase. I can’t talk much about it yet, but this is an amazing win. The second is the fact that IDC chose us as an innovative company to watch. Great day!

Every morning when I look at my calendar, I find myself looking forward several things. At the top of the list is the meetings in which I am going to discuss Membase technology, meet smart people, and demo a data management solution they can get excited about. I also look forward to the end of each day to see what improvements are in the latest build that make it even better for Membase users. It’s fun being in a position where people are hungry to learn about what you do and how you do it.

After five years in a big company I now remember how much I love being in a startup: to be able to move quickly, change direction fast when needed, develop features in days that in other environments would take weeks or even months, wear multiple hats, and most importantly, be close to the customer. I like building meaningful systems that solve real problems. This company is an amazing place to be and it is getting better every day.

And, by the way, we are *always* looking for great people to join us. If you’re one of them, just shoot me an email.

Winning awards is always fun. Over the years, companies I’ve been part of have won their fair share. But not all awards are created equal. Some definitely carry more weight than others, and I put the IDC Innovative Company to Watch award in this category. The fact that IDC does extensive research on the markets they address, talks regularly to a broad set of vendors and customers, and has a rigorous process for award selection all brings great credibility to the award. The award certainly has great meaning for us and I suspect this is also true for organizations who are thinking through what database to use for their next project.

As a small company it’s always a challenge to get the word out about your products and this is particularly true when you’re in a space like NoSQL where there are lots of competing technologies. Membase wasn’t one of the first NoSQL products in the market, so it’s encouraging that our innovative work and early customer success is being recognized so quickly. We’re very proud that while IDC could have given the award to any of the many NoSQL contenders, they chose to give it to us.

While we are thrilled to be recognized as a company to watch, it is even more gratifying that IDC understands the strategic importance of this new category of databases for enterprise customers and the significant near-term opportunity (tens of millions of dollars) it represents for companies like ours. IDC notes that they are seeing “an ‘intensifying trend’ for application development to move to the Web, creating the need for back-end architectures that demand extreme speed and scale elasticity while maintaining high levels of reliability. I can second that. We’ve seen a marked increase in the interest and uptake of our software – we just hit a run-rate of 30,000 downloads a month, and judging by this heightened demand in the marketplace, customers with interactive web applications are clearly looking for alternatives to complement their relational database solutions.

We’re also excited about the range of customer interest. Yes, our customers include many Web 2.0 type companies such as social gaming and ad targeting platforms among others – but many enterprise customers are now recognizing the need for non-relational solutions on the back end. A recent InformationWeek survey indicated that 44% of IT staff in the enterprise had not yet heard of NoSQL databases. But that means that 56% have heard of NoSQL– and in fact, if our interactions with customers is any indication, many of those already have pilots underway. From financial services to retailers to media companies, we’re seeing a growing number of inquiries and engagements in the enterprise and expect those numbers to increase as the value of NoSQL becomes more widely understood among those in mainstream IT.

I’d love to hear from you, especially if you are involved with web-based application development for an enterprise. What are your plans for exploring this emerging class of data management solutions optimized to support interactive web applications?

We NorthScalers have been hard at work and are proud to release Membase Server Beta 4, our final Beta release ahead of our general availability release.

Go and grab it here!

In addition to support for 64-bit Windows, we think you’ll be particularly excited by a major new feature in the release: memcached buckets!

Introducing Memcached Buckets
You now can create buckets in your Membase Server cluster that behave exactly like memcached, which means you can use Membase Server as a drop-in replacement for your existing memcached setup. In a single cluster you can now share the resources between memcached buckets and membase buckets.

Let’s look at the differences between memcached and membase bucket types:

Fundamentally, membase buckets are designed as permanent data stores. Once you put a key-value (KV) pair into a membase bucket it will remain there until you remove it (or the time-to-live expires). In a membase bucket, data will be written to disk, so your store can grow, constrained only by the available disk space. In addition, membase buckets offer replication; further, they are using vbuckets to allow data to be moved between nodes as cluster topology changes.

On the other hand, memcached buckets follow the memcached semantics: they are fundamentally designed as caches, not permanent data stores. As the cache runs out of available cache memory, items are evicted from the cache, based on a least-recently-used (LRU) policy. As a result, your application needs to be able to cope with the expected behavior, namely that an item stored in the cache may not be available at some later point. If that’s not the behavior you want, then you need to consider membase buckets as an alternative.

And, just like memcached, memcached buckets do not persist data to disk and there is no replication between nodes. When you add a node, keys served from the new node are no longer accessible from the old node, as they do not get transferred from the old node to the new one. There will be cache misses and the KV pairs will need to be set again on the new node – again, these are the normal, expected behaviors of a memcached setup.

Memory quota allocation for memcached buckets is identical to the that of the current NorthScale Memcached Server product. A fixed amount of memory per node is allocated for use by the memcached bucket, so adding or removing nodes will change the size of the memcached bucket. This is different from membase buckets, where the quota stays unchanged as the number of nodes changes, but we chose to keep memcached bucket behavior consistent with what current memcached users are accustomed to.

The new setup wizard lets you configure the default bucket when creating a new cluster, so you can start with a memcached bucket as the only bucket, and expand from there as your needs dictate.

A Quick Word on Disk Quotas
Based on our own experience and feedback from users, we took a hard second look at our disk quota system for membase buckets. Ultimately, we decided to remove that option. We believe this change brings the product more in line with typical database behavior: we now only return errors and run out of disk space when you actually run out of disk space Of course we are still showing disk usage per bucket and across the cluster, so that you can keep an eye on overall resource usage.

Enjoy Beta 4 and let us know what you think!

I am very excited that Membase ServerTemplates are now up and running on the RightScale Cloud Management Platform (see today’s announcement). RightScale customers now have easy access to a leading NoSQL database for the first time, and Membase customers can rest easy that when they’re ready to deploy their applications in the cloud they can take advantage of the leading cloud management platform in the industry.

For those who may not be familiar with RightScale ServerTemplates, they’re really cool. They provide a kind of blueprint for what a server should do in the cloud. They let users deploy preconfigured, cloud-ready servers that know how to operate in the cloud: how to obtain an IP address, how to submit monitoring data, and how to work with other servers in a cloud deployment. In our case, the Membase ServerTemplate sets everything up so you can easily use Right Scale to deploy, provision, and manage a Membase database server running in Amazon (AWS), Rackspace, GoGrid, Eucalyptus or any other cloud service that RightScale supports.

Establishing a close relationship with RightScale was an easy decision. Many of our customers, including Zynga, already use RightScale extensively and prodded us to integrate our products with theirs. We’ve been working closely with RightScale for the past couple of months and I think you’ll like what we’ve put together.

Since social gaming turned out to be one of biggest initial adopters of Membase, RightScale, and Amazon (AWS), we’ve collectively decided to host a webinar to talk about how leading social gaming companies are using our products to build successful businesses (register now). If you’re in the social gaming business you won’t want to miss this but even if you’re not you can still learn a lot about deploying your web application in the cloud.

So, check out our new partnership with RightScale and let me know what you think. And let us know what other hot cloud companies we should work with next. Our goal is to make Membase easily accessible no matter how and where you choose to develop and deploy your application. Tell us how we can make your life easier!