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Tag: SQL

  • HPE Buys Ampool to Improve SQL-Based Hybrid Analytics

    HPE Buys Ampool to Improve SQL-Based Hybrid Analytics

    Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced its acquisition of Ampool, in an effort to modernize the SQL stack.

    SQL is still one of the most widely-used database workload. With the increased adoption of cloud computing, however, SQL does have limitations. Ampool is the developer of a distributed SQL engine based on the open source Presto.

    HPE plans to use Ampool’s engine to accelerate “HPE Ezmeral analytics runtime for interactive SQL workloads.” This will help HPE better address customer needs, especially in data-intensive scenarios, such as AI, machine learning and analytics.

    “The acquisition builds on this strategy by adding Ampool’s technology components and open source expertise to the Ezmeral portfolio, which will over time turn into a set of SQL acceleration services made available through the HPE GreenLake cloud platform,” writes Anant Chintamaneni, Vice President and GM, HPTE Ezmeral. “This acquisition is also further evidence of HPE’s investment, focus and execution toward building out an open-source-based, IP rich capability for the HPE Ezmeral software portfolio, to deliver superior end to end analytics in fast growth markets.”

  • Microsoft Extends SQL Server to Linux

    Microsoft Extends SQL Server to Linux

    Microsoft announced that it will bring SQL Server to Linux, enabling a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux.

    For now, the core relational database capabilities are in preview (starting immediately) with availability coming mid-2017.

    “SQL Server on Linux will provide customers with even more flexibility in their data solution,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft. “One with mission-critical performance, industry-leading TCO, best-in-class security, and hybrid cloud innovations – like Stretch Database which lets customers access their data on-premises and in the cloud whenever they want at low cost – all built in.”

    “SQL Server’s proven enterprise experience and capabilities offer a valuable asset to enterprise Linux customers around the world,” said Paul Cormier, President, Products and Technologies at Red Hat. “We believe our customers will welcome this news and are happy to see Microsoft further increasing its investment in Linux. As we build upon our deep hybrid cloud partnership, spanning not only Linux, but also middleware, and PaaS, we’re excited to now extend that collaboration to SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, bringing enterprise customers increased database choice.”

    Microsoft also announced some other improvements to SQL Server including security encryption capabilities, in-memory database support and performance increases of up to 30-100x, improved data warehousing, new BI support for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, and advanced analytics.

    Guthrie discusses all of this and the coming Linux support here.

    General availability of SQL Server 2016 will come later this year.

    Image via Microsoft

  • HGST and NEC Launch PCIe SSD Appliance for Microsoft SQL Server

    Western Digital’s HGST and NEC announced a PCIe SSD Appliance for Microsoft SQL Server built on NEC Express 5800 and HGST FlashMAX II PCIe server-mounted flash storage.

    The appliance is aimed at boosting performance and reducing total cost of ownership by cutting rack space and power requirements. It offers twice the computer power of the previous generation 4CPU platform in one 4U server. According to the companies, it reduces rack space requirements by 69% and power consumption by 27%.

    “HGST is pleased to work with NEC to provide customers with this validated reference architecture and solution that has proven performance,” said Mike Gustafson, senior vice president and general manager, HGST Flash Platforms Group. “With the need for high-performance being a driving force in data center operations, the FlashMAX II was built from the ground up to provide unconditional and consistent levels of IOPS across a broad range of applications and workloads at all capacity utilization levels.”

    “NEC is excited about this announcement of the reference architecture combining our Scalable Enterprise Server and HGST FlashMax technology, providing secure and scalable capacity with unmatched performance,” said Tomoyasu Nishimura, general manager of NEC IT Platform Division. “We have a proven track record with HGST FlashMAX II technology, and we look forward to bringing this appliance as well as others to the market with a superior value proposition.”

    HGST’s FlashMAX II provides 8.8TB of flash per server, and doubles that of logical scan rates to 8.2GBps.

    The companies say, “With features once only found on mainframe or UNIX servers, this new appliance delivers significant and predicable performance, as well as scalability, to keep pace with the changing demands of today’s enterprise data center operations.”

    Image via Facebook

  • Microsoft Details The Future Of SQL

    Microsoft, like any other major tech company today, is all about big data. As more companies demand more data, Microsoft will have to step in with even bigger offerings on its server platforms to serve those needs. To that end, Microsoft has outlined its vision for the future of big data, SQL and its other data platforms.

    Quentin Clark, Corporate Vice President for the Data Platform Group at Microsoft, recently took to the SQL blog to talk about the recent changes that hit Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Office 2013. Of particular note, he says that the changes are meant to help prepare Microsoft for the shift from local databases to cloud computing.

    Today’s economy is built on the data platform that emerged with the microprocessor era—effectively, transactional SQL databases, relational data warehousing and operational BI. An entire cycle of business growth was led by the emergence of patterns around Systems of Record, everything from ERP applications to Point of Sale systems. The shift to cloud computing is bringing with it a new set of application patterns, which I sometimes refer to as Systems of Observation (SoO). There are several forms of these new application patterns: the Internet of Things (IoT), generally; solutions being built around application and customer analytics; and, consumer personalization scenarios.

    Later on, Clark says that the way data is being used by enterprise customers is changing. He points to diverse data sets that oftentimes now come from outside of the enterprise itself as a primary reason for Microsoft’s change to embrace the cloud’s ability to process even larger data sets. He also points to the rise in different kinds of analytics – like machine learning and application telemetry – as further reason to invest in the future of big data.

    Interestingly enough, Clark also points of data by-products as being useful in today’s day and age. Whereas previously these by-products would be cast aside in favor of data related to the core business, Clark notes that all data is important to the business looking to catch more consumers. To that end, Microsoft wants to provide the services necessary for businesses to capitalize on this data:

    With these characteristics in mind, our vision is to provide a great platform and solutions for our customers to realize the new value of information and to empower new experiences with data. This platform needs to span across the cloud and the enterprise – where so much key information and business processes exist. We want to deliver Big Data solutions to the masses through the power of SQL Server and related products, Windows Azure data services, and the BI capabilities of Microsoft Office. To do this, we are taking steps to ensure our data platform meets the demands of today’s modern business.

    It’s through all this that Clark says Microsoft will work in 2014 to offer its enterprise customers modern transaction processing, modern data warehousing and modern business intelligence through the upgrades made to its SQL, Azure and other cloud platforms. In the coming months, it will further discuss the trends it sees in big data and invite the community to share their thoughts on where it’s going.

    Image via Microsoft

  • Amazon Launches Amazon RDS For PostgreSQL

    Amazon Launches Amazon RDS For PostgreSQL

    Amazon announced RDS (Relational Database Service) for PostgreSQL on Thursday, and that PostgreSQL is now available as a managed service on Amazon Web Services with up to 3TB of storage, 20,000 IOPS and support for high-availability.

    Amazon RDS supports the core PostgreSQL database features, like PostGIS, free text indexing and search extensions.

    Users can scale I/O operations to 30,000 IOPS per database instance. according to Amazon, achieving “consistent, fast performance.”

    Users will be able to deploy production Postgre SQL apps using the multi-availability zone option, and Amazon says RDS will operate a synchronous stand-by replica with an automated fail-over mechanism. It also supports cross-region snapshot copy operations.

    “Since we launched Amazon RDS four years ago, a large number of enterprises and startups have adopted the service because it allows them to run familiar relational databases without any of the operational complexity of on-premise systems, at a substantially lower cost,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services, AWS. “As mobile, web, social and geospatial applications proliferate, we have seen a steady demand for PostgreSQL as a managed service. We’re pleased to bring the agility, manageability and cost benefits of the Amazon RDS platform to PostgreSQL.”

    “Thousands of enterprises rely on ArcGIS to build rich geospatial applications that combine location data with business analytics,” said Marwa Mabrouk, Cloud and Big Data Product Manager, ESRI Inc., which has been testing Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. “As our customers move their applications to the cloud, many of them choose PostgreSQL. We are excited about Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL because customers can focus on their business and not on the database administration. We think Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is simple to use, cost-effective and will enable ArcGIS developers to be more productive. We are looking forward to expanding our usage.”

    The product is available around the world in every Amazon Web Services region. More info here.

  • Get Ready For Lots Of Microsoft Enterprise Releases This Fall

    Microsoft has announced a bunch of new enterprise cloud solutions coming this fall.

    On October 18th, the company will release Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 for businesses to create data centers, as well as Visual Studio 2013 and the new .NET 4.5.1 for app creation.

    On November 1st, the company will start offering Enterprise Agreement customers access to discounted Windows Azure prices.

    The company announced a strategic partnership with Equinix to provide customers with more cloud connection options. This follows similar previously announced partnerships with AT&T and others. Customers will be able to connect their networks with Windows Azure at Equinix exchange locations.

    Microsoft introduced Windows Azure US Government Cloud for government customers, and Windows Azure has been granted “FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board Provisional Authority to Operate,” which the company says makes it the first public cloud of its kind to achieve this level of government authorization.

    Next week, the company will release a second preview of SQL Server 2014 with increased performance improvements. Later this month, Microsoft will release Windows Azure HDInsight Service, an Apache Hadoop-based service that works with SQL Server for big data analytics.

    On October 18th, Microsoft will release Windows Intune aimed at helping IT departments give mobile employees secure access to apps and data.Later this month, they’re also launching a Microsoft Remote Desktop app for Windows Server 2012 R2.

    Also coming later this month is Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Fall ’13. Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 is now available.

    “As enterprises move to the cloud they are going to bet on vendors that have best-in-class software as a service applications, operate a global public cloud that supports a broad ecosystem of third party services, and deliver multi-cloud mobility through true hybrid solutions,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise executive vice president. “If you look across the vendor landscape, you can see that only Microsoft is truly delivering in all of those areas.”

    More details about all these releases here.

    Image: Microsoft

  • Airbnb Forgoes SQL In Favor Of Memcached

    Airbnb Forgoes SQL In Favor Of Memcached

    Airbnb recently shared an engineer Q&A talking about building its Airbnb Neighborhoods feature. Here’s a look at the feature if you’re unfamiliar:

    Introducing Airbnb Neighborhoods from Airbnb on Vimeo.

    Basically, it shows users pages about neighborhoods in cities, so they can decide where they want to stay when they visit.

    You can read the full Q&A here, but here’s the part where they explain why they ultimately went with Memcached over a SQL database or DynamoDB:

    At first, it seemed we wanted a SQL database, as our data had relations. However, this was ruled out based on the need for mass updates. Next, we looked at an in-house NoSQL solution that we call Dyson. Dyson seemed to give us the flexibility we needed with writes and updates, so we tried it. For reference, Dyson is backed by Amazon’s DynamoDB, a reliable, but limited, managed, NoSQL solution. In essence, if we put the data right into DynamoDB, then Dyson can serve it. This led to the creation of a DynamoDB cascading tap. Countless timeouts, headaches and late nights later, we had a working solution.

    However, there was a problem, namely DynamoDB’s 65KB storage limit. When you’re storing uncompressed JSON, that’s a pretty easy target to reach. As a band-aid, we engineered a solution involving pages of tuples. To say this solution was sub-optimal is putting it mildly, and the performance was even worse.

    With launch quickly approaching, brilliant words saved the day: “You don’t need a database, you need a [expletive deleted] cache” 1. So that’s what we did, we traded our database for a cache. Specifically, we switched from Dyson to Memcached.

    Here’s a look at the Neighborhoods admin tool:

    neighborhoods-admin-tool from AirbnbNerds on Vimeo.

    [via GigaOm]

  • Idera Launches Three New SQL Server Tools

    Idera Launches Three New SQL Server Tools

    Idera announced the availability of three new free tools for SQL Server DBAs and IT administrators: Server Backup Free, SQL Backup Status Reporter and SQL Permissions Extractor Free.

    Idera CEO Rick Pleczko says, “Idera has made a commitment to providing free tools and solutions that help both IT and database administrators better manage their servers. It’s our way of paying back the success that the community has helped us achieve.”

    “Idera’s Server Backup Free delivers a free copy of their leading high performance server backup product,” the company says in an announcement. “Idera’s SQL backup status reporter and SQL permissions extractor allows DBAs to quickly and easily ensure that databases have been backed up and copy permissions across servers. All of these tools are designed to help administrators better manage the growing number of servers in the enterprise.”

    Server Backup Free has all of the features of the Enterprise version, except it’s for a single server. Features include the abiliy to backup physical and virtual servers in just minutes (as opposed to hours), the ability to backup to any disk-based storage (second hard disk, NAS, SAN, etc.), the ability to restore files in seconds with Disk Safe technology, and “easy” installation.

    Backup Status Reporter lets DBAs view a graphical representation of backups across their SQL Server environment. Features include: the ability to identify databases that haven’t had backups, the ability to view backup history (including backup date and type), a simplified grid view for easy sorting and navigation, and the ability to identify full and differential backups for one or many databases.

    Backup status reporter

    SQL Permissions Extractor lets DBAs copy and reassign permissions from one server to another without having to write any script. It can generate T-SQL scripts for copying of user permissions to other servers, and enables the editing, saving and execution of permissions scripts. It also lets users include object level permissions for selected databases.

  • Google Makes Some Improvements To Cloud SQL, Launches Trial Offer

    Google announced some updates to Google Cloud SQL, which will enable users to work with bigger and faster MySQL databases.

    Google has increased the amount of available storage to 100GB, which is ten times more than before. They’ve also increased the maximum size of instances to 16GB RAM, which is four times more data users can cache. Additionally, on the speed front, they’ve added functionality for optional asynchronous replication, giving users “the write performance of a non-replicated database, “but the availability of a replicated one,” as Google puts it.

    “You want your applications to be fast, even with millions of users,” says product manager Joe Faith. “Anytime your user tries to retrieve information from the app or update settings, it should happen instantly. For the best performance, you need faster, larger databases – especially if you have a growing user base to serve.”

    “Google App Engine is designed to scale,” he adds. “And now Google Cloud SQL—a MySQL database that lives in Google’s cloud—has new features to meet the demand for faster access to more data.”

    Users can also now choose to store data and run their Cloud SQL database instance in either Google’s US or EU data centers. There is also new integration with Google Apps Script. You can publish and share data with Google Sheets, add data to Google Sites page or create Google Forms without the hosting or server configuration concerns.

    Finally, Google announced that there is a new six-month free trial offer for Cloud SQL, effective until June 1, 2013.

  • Microsoft Updates The Windows Azure SQL Database

    Microsoft has been very aggressive over the past year with its Windows Azure service. The cloud computing platform has been positioned as a worthy competitor to Google’s App Engine service, and Microsoft continually provides new updates to it. The latest update brings a number of new features to the SQL database.

    Microsoft recently detailed the major updates that hit the Windows Azure SQL Database. The updates add four new features in the areas of Linked Server support, recursive triggers and other goodies.

    First up, it was revealed that it’s now possible to add a Windows Azure SQL Database as a Linked Server, then it can used with Distributed Queries across both local and cloud databases. The new feature allows users to write queries that utilizes data from local networks as well as cloud data. This functionality was available in Windows Azure before, but it relied on a method that was not very good for performance. Here’s an example of how to connect to the Windows Azure SQL Database through Distributed Queries:

    Microsoft Updates The Windows Azure SQL Database

    Another new feature is expanded support for recursive triggers. Microsoft notes that triggers will now call themselves recursively by default, but it can be turned on on or off at the user’s discretion. Check out the documentation for more finformation.

    The SQL database also features support for DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS. This allows users to see the current query optimization statistics. Users can then estimate the “cardinality or number of rows in the query result.” From there, it creates a high quality query plan. You can check out the documentation here.

    Finally, Microsoft has added the ability to configure SQL database firewall rules at the database level. It’s a step up from the previous firewall management tools that only allowed users to set the rules at the server level. Implementation at the database level allows users to set different rules for different databases. You can check out the documentation here.

  • Bing Gives Some Lessons On Bing Maps

    Bing Gives Some Lessons On Bing Maps

    Google and Bing do things differently. I think we all understand that by now. Their differences apparently extend to how they teach. Google teaches people through their weekly Office Hours Hangouts which gives developers to talk to the people behind the product they use to get real answers. Bing just, well, they put slides on the Internet. Are you feeling up to revisiting the feeling of college lectures? Bing sure is.

    The Bing Maps team has released two separate slide shows, unfortunately powered by Silverlight, that detail how a developer can leverage Bing maps to their advantage. The first is just more or less a normal introductory course in Bing Maps development. The second gets a little more advanced by showing developers how to use SQL server spatial data in their Bing Maps applications.

    The introductory course explains the benefits of using Bing Maps while showing you how to get started on development. The rest of the slides are dedicated to the AJAX7 Control method in Bing Maps alongside the REST interfaces that you will be using. It even has a test at the end to make sure you were paying attention.

    Bing Maps Learning Snack
    Bing Maps Learning Snack
    by
    Snack Owner

    The second explains how SQL server spacial data works together with Bing Maps to create advanced data applications. It then spends some time on explaining the finer points of working with data in SQL Server 2012. Finally, it will show you how to combine the two to create great Bing Maps applications.

    Bing Maps and SQL Server Spatial Data
    Bing Maps and SQL Server Spatial Data
    by
    Snack Owner

  • Amazon RDS Now Supports ASP.NET

    Online retail giant Amazon just announced a new update which allows users to run Microsoft’s database and web programming platform ASP.NET, on its Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Amazon reveals that users can now use Microsoft tools they are accustomed to – to deploy, manage and scale SQL Server databases and ASP.NET applications. Amazon also points out that RDS presently runs SQL Server 2008 R2, with an upgrade SQL Server 2012 pending.

    Charlie Bell, Vice President, Amazon Web Services, states, “Amazon RDS now supports three of the most popular relational database engines, giving businesses the flexibility to launch a managed Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or MySQL database based on the needs of their application. With Amazon RDS, customers no longer have to become experts in database set-up and management and can shift their focus to building and improving the capabilities of their applications. We’re excited to give Windows and ASP.Net developers new options for taking advantage of AWS to quickly deploy and easily manage their databases and applications in the cloud.”

    Some might see this as a tactic to lure users away from Microsoft’s own Azure cloud environment. After all, the two compete – soon after Amazon launched its CloudSearch, Microsoft turned around and adapted Bing search to Azure.

    In related news, a different sector under the Amazonian umbrella just beat out Netflix in a customer satisfaction survey, indicative of possible things to come, as Amazon delves further into the business of streaming content.

  • Programming Languages Are Constantly Evolving

    I think that we all can agree that programming is awesome. It brings us everything from computer applications to video games. Anybody who claims that programming is not the bee’s knees has obviously never seen a computer beat people in Jeopardy.

    This awesome infographic from Silicon Angle shows the how far we have come from the first programming language to where we are now.

    Before we ever reached the intellectual machines beating men at Jeopardy, programming had simple roots. It began in 1954 with Fortran, a programming language created by IBM that was used for computational mathematics.

    Things got even more awesome with the creation of BASIC in 1964 and SQL in 1975. I personally owe a lot to C++ which emerged in 1983. If not for that particular programming language, games on the Nintendo Entertainment System might not have been as awesome.

    1995 saw the rise of Java and Javascript which are used to this day from open source applications to custom versions of it powering your smartphones.

    What is going to come next? Nobody knows, but I’m sure we’ll one day invent programming that allows machines to write programming for us. The dawn of robot supremacy will be caused by our awesome programming skills.

    What do you think the next big break in programming will be? Let us know in the comments.

    The Evolution of Programming [Infographic]
    Via: ServicesANGLE