Database Technology Trends

Keeping up with the news from so many different sources is getting harder and harder these days. That’s why I try to offer a one-stop-shop for your major database vendor news. You get the scoop and if you want to dig deeper, the links are right there. Let’s get started.

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

As Managing Partner of Dynamic Database Solutions, LLC, I am proud to share a special announcement with you. Dynamic DB is currently launching the ActiveBase software suite into the US market. My goal is to introduce you to new database technology and trends, and ActiveBase is definitely a new technology you should take a closer look at.

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

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 

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

Thank you for reading,

Peter Dobler

First of all I have to apologize to my loyal readers for the long absence from my blog. In simple terms, “I got busy”. But in these economic times, I guess this is a good thing. I don’t want to give a promise I can’t keep, but I will do my best to keep this blog up-to-date.

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