M-A-O-L

SQL Server 2008 SP3 is now available!

A few customers requested updates in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP3 are:

• Enhanced upgrade experience from previous versions of SQL Server to SQL Server 2008 SP3. In addition, we have increased the performance & reliability of the setup experience.
• In SQL Server Integration Services logs will now show the total number of rows sent in Data Flows.
• Enhanced warning messages when creating the maintenance plan if the Shrink Database option is enabled.
• Resolving database issue with transparent data encryption enabled and making it available even if certificate is dropped.
• Optimized query outcomes when indexed Spatial Data Type column is referenced by DTA Database Tuning Advisor.
• Superior user experience with Sequence Functions e.g Row_Numbers in a Parallel execution plan.

Go get it!

Oracle docs show plans for Hadoop, NoSQL about the Oracle Loader for Hadoop, and Added Session: Big Data Appliance about Oracle’s Big Data Appliance.

Exadata Mini is the Oracle DB Appliance (ODBA?), as Oracle announced now.

It turns out that Oracle’s new small appliance isn’t really an Exadata Mini-Me. Rather, the Oracle Database Appliance is — well, it seems to be a box with an Oracle DBMS in it. Plus Oracle RAC and so on.

via Oracle Database Appliance soundbites and Database Appliance for the Masses.

Spot on article about Database as a Service Cloud DaaS Managed Service Fuels NewSQL Market:

While this sounds simple, public cloud companies soon learn that the Devil is in the details. Managing someone else’s database, without insight into their business processes, performance demands, scaling demands, evolving application requirements, and more, is extremely challenging and demands a new class of DBMS. These demands have created a market need that is now being filled by companies using the moniker “NewSQL”.

I’m not sold on calling this NewSQL, but hey, people like to invent new names from time to time…

Some Sybase PR about their latest release: Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.7 Boosts Performance and Lowers Cost of Managing Exploding Data Volumes

ASE 15.7 further reduces cost of operations by simplifying administration and enhancing system security, providing a database manager that remains easy to manage while protecting against intrusion. ASE 15.7’s online operations and extended diagnostic features increase data availability, optimize the data for application performance and quickly pinpoint bottlenecks to speed performance. Strong password encryption and single login profiles protect the database from unauthorized external access attempts and make it easier to manage large numbers of users.

Sybase 15.7 is quite a major update to 15.5, there are more details in the Sybase ASE 15.7 New Features guide.

Oracle’s MySQL Blog reports about New Commercial Extensions for MySQL Enterprise Edition:

MySQL 5.5 GA and MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Releases have delivered many new compelling features to the MySQL users and community for testing, feedback and use.

In addition, commercial customers have access to a number of commercial extensions already included in MySQL Enterprise Edition:

• MySQL Enterprise Monitor
• MySQL Enterprise Backup

Continuing the business model of MySQL, we are adding three new commercial extensions to MySQL Enterprise Edition:

• MySQL Enterprise Scalability
• MySQL Enterprise High Availability
• MySQL Enterprise Security

Via Heise, who have some coverage in German.

David Menninger writes a nice intro to Splunk in Splunk Makes Machine-Generated Big Data Serve Analytics:

Splunk focuses on a specific segment of the big-data market: machine-generated data. This type of data originates constantly from many sources throughout an organization and in large quantities. The other common characteristic of machine-generated data is that generally it is less structured than data in typical relational databases. Often the information is captured as logs consisting of text files containing various record lengths and record structures. To effectively utilize this loosely structured information in real time, two challenges must be overcome: loading the data quickly and easily navigating through and analyzing the information once it is loaded.

I’m apparently not the only one having difficulties succinctly defining what Big Data is – let alone is there agreement in the industry, as to what the Big Data category should or should not include, as seen in Monash’s latest rambling “Big data” has jumped the shark. Over time Big Data as a term will likely either start to mean everything involving a lot of data (in anybody’s definition of “a lot”), or be replaced with a better term.

You don’t have to wait for long… Oracle Introduces Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack, just days after I blogged about it at Forthcoming Oracle Appliances. Configurations from half rack to several full racks can be combined for massive storage. Interesting that Oracle wants us to use this not only for relational data but all sorts or other stuff as well:

The Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack is ideal for storing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data including historical relational data; backups of Oracle Exadata Database Machine; weblogs; documents, images, LOBs and XML files

Curt Monash about Forthcoming Oracle appliances, based on information from Oracle’s earnings call (full transcript) last week. There will be an IMDB appliance based on TimesTen for high speed analytics, and a Hadoop appliance for MapReduce jobs, targetted at data preprocessing and feeding into Oracle. It really looks like Oracle is full steam ahead on the appliance strategy, and is also starting to embrace the MapReduce and massively parallel models. All of that is likely to be announced in more details at Oracle Open World.