Richard Muirwood, CEO of Tideway Systems, and I had our semi-annual chat the other day. Tideway's Tideway Foundation™is a management tool making it possible for organizations to get a clear understanding of the underlying physical and virtual infrastructure supporting their business applications. They call what they do "dependency mapping." ...

It's these medical records experts whose function has been lost in the translation from paper to magnetic ink, Damianakis concluded, and unless that is recovered digital systems will never work as well as paper. by Dana Blankenhorn

The most striking thing about the appliance computing applications market is that most customers have one or two global applications and a range of special purpose stuff accumulated and refined over many years - the opposite of what happens in data processing where thousands of tiny applications get strung...

After years of the federal government grabbing all the data it could find, building huge collections through which to data-mine for connections that would yield leads to terrorism suspects, a 352-page study released on Tuesday by a committee of the National Research Council warned that such goals "will be...

The application of standard artificial intelligence techniques, most of which have been around for many years, to the enormous and growing databases being created by health systems is very much overdue. by Dana Blankenhorn

Most modern large enterprise Business Intelligence BI tools are very robust and feature rich these days. Up until a few years ago BI users could blame vendors for most of their BI ills. This is getting harder and harder to do. Many of the BI tools, especially the ones reviewed...

Just a couple of months after releasing to manufacturing SQL Server 2008, Microsoft is starting to offer details about its next release of its flagship database. That product, code-named "Killimanjaro," will ship in the first half of 2010, according to Microsoft officials. by Mary Jo Foley

In its initial release, the application supports access to data stored in relational databases such as Oracle, MySQL and IBM DB2, as well as the comma-separated values CSV file format, and Excel spreadsheets. It allows users to authenticate, encrypt and sign services using the WS-Security and HTTP security standards. In...

When you look at staffing for the typical iSeries based data center the one thing that's most striking is that relative to the mainframe data center positions are broader, people less constrained, and whole customer facing versus internal distinction is completely missing. by Paul Murphy

I think that Oracle is going to have a cloud offering, IBM is going to have a cloud offering, Sun is going to have a cloud offering, and it's going to be the big talk in the big industry over the next two or three years. I think they are...

As part of the occasional series Life in post-Constitutional America I'm pleased to offer a brief primer on How to read your FBI file. It isn't as easy as you'd think, since the FBI has failed several times to create a modern data management system - which may not be...

Google is known as a search titan, but its real business is running data centers. On Wednesday, Google handed out a few key tips as it touted its data center efficiency and sustainability efforts. In a blog post, Google's senior vice president of operations Urs Hölzle outlined...

Microsoft is gearing up to go big with its plans for its own version of its hosted development platform later this month. But Amazon.com isn't sitting idly by, waiting for Microsoft to rain on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). by Mary Jo Foley

Today xkoto announced that they've added Microsoft's SQL Server to the list of database management systems that they're supporting in GRIDSCALE, fulfilling a promise to expand their offering to support many databases made when they exited stealth mode in December 2007. For those keeping track, I introduced xkoto GRIDSCALE and...

As Oracle gives up its database, warehousing, and messaging markets to open source it's going to bet the business on completion enterprise application stacks - selling Fusion and "giving away" everything else with it. by Paul Murphy

Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison caught the Oracle OpenWorld conference audience by surprise the day before by rolling out the Exadata line of two hardware-software configurations. The integrated servers re-architect the relationship between Oracle's 11g database and high-performance storage. Exadata, in essence, gives new meaning to "attached" storage for...

Because I'm not really all that busy sarcasm drips here, it's fallen to me to figure out what is happening to our MCAS scores. For those of you outside the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the MCAS is our battery of standardized tests in English, Math, science, history (the list goes...

It seems that data infrastructure vendors are rushing to the realization that older database architectures have hit a wall in terms of scale and performance. The general solution favors exploiting parallelism to the hilt and aligning database and logic functions in close proximity, while also exploiting MapReduce approaches to provide...

Now that the optimized hardware and software are available to produce the means to analyze and query huge data sets in near real-time, the focus moves to how to best leverage these capabilities. Soon, business executives will have among the most powerful IT tools ever developed at their disposal to...

Yesterday at Oracle OpenWorld, Larry Ellison announced the database giant's first foray into the hardware realm, unveiling the HP/Oracle Database Machine, branded as Exadata. The Exadata system is a combination of Oracle's 11g database engine using Automated Storage Management ASM to manage a grid of HP Proliant servers with 12 SATA...