Privacy. It’s on everyone’s minds these days. A couple of months ago it was Apple and Google that were drawing the ire of consumers with the storing of location data. And of course, Facebook is always mentioned when people discuss …

Established software vendors face a difficult balancing act between meeting customer demands for pay-per-usage cloud pricing models while guarding against revenue erosion on traditionally priced offerings. If Amazon’s price for Oracle Database on RDS becomes the norm for price discrimination …

Sun Microsystems is losing about $100 million a month according to Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, the company that’s set to acquire Sun. Oracle is waiting to get clearance from European regulators before the deal can go through and Oracle can step in and try to put an end to this loss.

Last year, Yahoo debuted its YQL language, which lets users query, filter, and join data across web data sources or services on the web. YQL or Yahoo Query Language is based on a SQL-like language, and it helps apps run faster with fewer lines of code.

Today, Yahoo announced a new feature for YQL, and that is the Insert/Update/Delete feature. A spokesperson for Yahoo tells WebProNews this extends the platform by adding “write" capability to its capabilities, including YQL Open Data Tables and Execute."

As Zack reported, Sun is buying MySQL for ~$800M plus $200M in options. Interestingly, the MySQL acquisition represents 8% of Sun’s current market cap (~$13 Bil). While I’m happy for the MySQL team, my views on Sun’s OSS “strategy” are mixed at best.

Why does Google sponsor spam and tell people to blend their AdSense ads, but try to control other link sales?

In reading Richard MacManus’ Why Google is extending RSS, I couldn’t help feeling that he was missing the point a bit.

Data management company McObject (I’m storin’ it!) has a new embedded systems tool combo. The new version of eXtremeDB in-memory embedded database comes with Accelerated Technology’s Nucleus real-time operating system (RTOS), a side and a drink. Okay, no side and drink.

The Transportation Security Administration said they plan to have their computerized passenger screening program ready later this year but it won’t include the hot-button, commercially-maintained databases, so denigrated by privacy groups.

You’ve finally created databases that you can actually use to store and manipulate all your critical data. That’s great news and quite an accomplishment. But in your rush to get your employees to start entering information into these databases, you skipped the training process and let them go at it alone.

PIM Team Case Study

An Embedded database is a specific database genus that does not run as a separate process, instead, it is directly linked (“embedded”) into the application. Herein, the database is integrated into the application and the end-user has little or no knowledge that the database exists. Embedded databases are sometimes referred to as “fire and forget” or “implement and forget” databases, since they require no or minimal database administration.

Crystal Reports is the most flexible tool on the market and it has market recognition.

A key ingredient in any e-commerce storefront application is the database. This is where information unique to a particular store is archived. One grouping of unique information is product data.

At one point in time I was tasked with running over 70 databases on more than a dozen servers without any of the costly third-party tools that exist to accomplish such tasks, and I often get asked how can you handle such large numbers of databases. This is a short article that will show you how to use the handy OSQL command line utility, provided with SQL Server, to execute repetitive tasks against large numbers of databases or to manage large numbers of servers.

If you collect and use any kind of data you probably have some kind of organizing system. Whether you use index cards, a filing cabinet, Excel spreadsheets, or some kind of database program, your system should let you add and change data, delete data, and retrieve data, and it should work faster and more efficiently than if you had to do it by hand.