SQLSummit: Exploring Databases, SQL/XML, XQuery, Grid Computing, and Information Retrieval

Microsoft Updates Data Access Capabilities with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5
Microsoft introduced new data access capabilities with the release of a beta version of Visual Studio 2008 and NET 3.5 SP1. The ADO.NET Entity Framework supports the database development cycle beginning with development of the conceptual model. ADO.NET Data Services enable applications to expose data as a REST-based data service that can be consumed by Web clients within a corporate network and across the Internet

Bradmark Announces Update of Database Surveillance Tool
Bradmark Technologies, Inc., a provider of enterprise monitoring and database administration tools, has released version 4.1 of Bradmark Surveillance™. Version 4.1 includes enhancements for improving reliability and performance and reliability when monitoring databases, including Sybase, Oracle, IBM DB2
UDB and MS SQL Server environments.

SOA, Middleware and Database Gurus To Speak at DataServices World 2008
DataServices World Chair Ken North discusses the importance of data services for SOA and next-generation applications such as mashups. He also announces the program for DataServices World 2008, which includes a stellar cast of speakers. The distinguished faculty includes Dr. Mark Davydov (Blue Cross Blue Shield), Paul Rivot (IBM), John Goodson (DataDirect), Dr. Michael Carey (BEA), Mike Pizzo (Microsoft), Mark Hapner (Sun), John Senor (iWay Software), Nikita Ogievetsky (Morgan Stanley) and Dr. Carlo Innocenti (DataDirect). The conference runs June 24 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.

Program Announced for LinkedData Planet, June 17-18 in New York City
The program for LinkedData Planet has been announced. The distinguished faculty includes Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the W3C. The conference theme is the confluence of enterprise computing, semantic and data integration for web applications such as the Semantic Web and Web 3.0. The conference runs June 17-18, 2008 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.

Information Builders Releases Mashup Tool for BI and Google Maps
Information Builders, Inc. (IBI) has released a new mashup application that integrates Google Maps and business intelligence data. IBI's WebFOCUS for Google Maps GUI supports overlaying maps with data without creating custom code. Users can leverage Google Maps to filter and drill down to WebFOCUS reports that contain details on one or more geographic locations.

EnterpriseDB Raises $10 Million from IBM and Other Investors
EnterpriseDB has raised $10 million in series C financing from IBM, Charles Rivers Ventures, Fidelity Ventures and Valhalla Partners. EnterpriseDB offers services for PostgreSQL, a version known as Postgres Plus, and PostgreSQL Plus Advanced Server for Linux and AIX.

LogiXML Adds ETL Tool to Web-Based BI Product Line
LogiXML, Inc. release of LogiETL, an extract, transform and load tool for putting enterprise data into a consistent format to support integration with a variety of applications. LogiETL is a Web-based data integration tool that can transfer data from disparate sources, including SQL databases, web services, Excel and XML files, RSS/ATOM feeds, Amazon SimpleDB, Google Docs, and Google Spreadsheets.

Sun UltraSPARC Processor's Transactional Memory to Revolutionize Database Servers
Sun Microsystems plans to ship a new UltraSPARC processor, code-named Rock, that will introduce transactional memory. By supporting atomic transactions, it promises to reduce bottlenecks in database servers. Ken North take a closer look at Rock transaction processing and database price/performance.

Sun Microsystems Acquires MySQL for $1 Billion
In a deal Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz described as the "most important acquisition in the company's history", Sun Microsystems is acquiring the open-source database company MySQL AB. Ken North takes a closer look at the MySQL acquisition, and past acquisitions of database companies.

Navigation and XPath Holding Back the SQL/XML Database Industry
Michael M. David discusses flaws in the implementation of XML support for modern databases. He explores limitations imposed by single-leg, linear hierarchical processing, an approach used with XPath navigation of document content. He discusses global views, multi-leg queries and using hierarchical semantics to increase data value. Michael illustrates with examples of non-procedural processing using a hierarchical XML processor.

IBM Acquires Solid Information Technology and SolidDB In-Memory Database
IBM has reached an agreement to acquire Solid Information Technology, the in-memory database company. Annual revenues for Solid are not a compelling reason for buying the company, but Solid has a transactional storage engine certified for MySQL. SolidDB is a prime competitor of the TimesTen in-memory database product acquired by Oracle.

Amazon Enters Web Database Services Race with SimpleDB
Amazon Web Services has jumped into the web database hosting business with the announcement of Amazon SimpleDB. A limited beta is available for the new service that runs in conjunction with Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). SimpleDB exposes a web service interface for storing and retrieving multiple data sets.

Sybase Announces WorkSpace 2.0 for SQL Developers
Sybase, Inc. announced Sybase® WorkSpace 2.0, a developer toolkit based on Eclipse. WorkSpace 2.0 provides an integrated design and development environment that combines enterprise modeling, database development, data federation, Web application development and services development and orchestration.

SQL Injection Vulnerability with JBoss Seam
Secunia has issued an advisory for JBoss Seam users that warns of an SQL injection vulnerability. Input to the "order" parameter of the getRenderedEjbql() method is not properly sanitized. The vulnerability affects JBoss Seam versions before 2.0.0 GA.

Sun to Drop Developer Tools and Encourage Move to NetBeans IDE
Sun Microsystems. Sun will discontinue Sun Java Studio Creator and Sun Java Studio Enterprise. It is encouraging developers to migrate to the open source NetBeans IDE, a rival to the Eclipse tool suite that supports multi-language development. Sun is offering six months free support for migrating to NetBeans 6.0.

Updates to SQLSummit.com Driver, Provider and Extender Catalogs
SQLSummit.com continues to provide the most comprehensive catalog of database drivers, providers and XQuery engines. There have been recent additions to the list of JDBC drivers, ODBC drivers, ADO.NET Data Providers and IBM DB2 Extenders.

Middleware Under a Microscope in White Paper
A 90-page white paper from Ken North Computing, LLC discusses the role and importance of data access middleware. "Middleware in Action: Industrial Strength Data Access " describes how middleware plugs into architectures for distributed applications and services, including SOA and ESB. It explains defining characteristics of best-of-breed data access middleware, including features for performance and scalability. The report, and a separate executive summary (HTML

), provide a features checklist for compiling a report card for database drivers and data providers.

1968 Survey of Database Systems Uncovered
A cache of documents in a URS Project-70 folder has prompted Ken North to write about first-generation database technology. His report includes the CODASYL database systems survey of September 1968.

Reshaping and Restructuring XML
Michael M. David returns to SQLSummit.com to explore two approaches to transforming XML hierarchical data structures. He explains the difference between restructuring and reshaping XML data, with the latter driven by the semantics of the data structure.

Security Flaws Undermine Database, E-Mail and Networking Infrastructure
Researchers have recently uncovered security vulnerabilities in the OpenSSL toolkit that's deployed on 60% of the web servers on the Internet. The potential problems include buffer overruns, denial-of-security attacks, forging of digital certificates and compromising of confidential information. Ken North discusses these OpenSSL vulnerabilities, recent research about an RSA attack based on Simple Branch Prediction Analysis, and the effect on digital certificates used for authentication and secure communications.

XML in Focus
The latest release of IBM DB2 adds an XML type, new indexing methods and other capabilities for operating with XML in databases. Ken North takes a look at DB2 pureXML technology and implications for SOA, web services and content processing.

CWD4ALL for Modeling SQL and Multidimensional Data
CWD4ALL for SQL Developer is the latest edition of Ikan Group's CWD4ALL data modeling tool. It enables DBAs and developers to use entity attribute relationship modeling to create models. The product supports reverse engineering and modeling for SQL and OLAP databases.

Open Source BI Poised for Great Leap Forward
The availability of open source business intelligence (BI) software has improved dramatically in the past two years. A recent survey by Ventana Research reports surprising levels of adoption and plans for open source BI. In this article about open source BI software, Ken North discusses trends, LAMP, Eclipse and what's available from open source BI projects.

News

ESRI ArcGIS 9.3 to Support Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Spatial
ESRI announced ESRI ArcGIS 9.3 will exploit the spatial technology included with Microsoft SQL Server 2008. Microsoft is providing a tight integration of spatial technology with SQL Server's relational and business intelligence capabilities. ESRI software is currently in use by more than 300,000 organizations, including the 200 largest US cities, more than 2/3 of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities.

dbaDIRECT Receives Research Grant from Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation
dbaDIRECT, a provider of remote monitoring and automated DBA services, has received a grant from the Kentucky Enterprise Fund. The award from the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation will support the company's research. dbaDIRECT currently manages more than 3,000 corporate databases, including Oracle, DB2, Sybase. MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server databases.

Red Gate Announces One Click Support with SQL Multi Script
Red Gate Software has released SQL Multi Script, a new tool for database administrators (DBAs) managing multiple databases across multiple servers. With one mouse click, SQL Multi Script will execute scripts against multiple SQL Servers. A 14-day trial version of the software is available for download.

IBM to Ship DB2 7.5 for VSE and VM
IBM has announced DB2 Server for VSE and VM version 7.5 mainframe will begin shipping November 30. It includes a newly designed client that enables users to buy just the Client Edition of the product. The Client Edition adds bind file support and reduced DRDA® code path length to simplify connecting to data servers.

Information Builders WebFOCUS Bundled with IBM DB2 Web Query
Information Builders' WebFOCUS is now included with IBM DB2 Web Query for System i, which is a replacement for IBM Query for iSeries and Query/400. The agreement for DB2 Web Query with IBM is the first time WebFOCUS has been licensed as an oem or private version.

ZohoDB Enhances Zoho Office Suite with Database and Reporting Features
Zoho, provider of a leading Web-based office suite, has announced the availability of an online database and reporting capability. ZohoDB supports multiple SQL dialects, including Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL. It is in beta test and doesn't currently support integration with other Zoho applications, such as the spreadsheet (Zoho Sheet) and application creator (Zoho Creator).

Fast, reliable data access for ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET and XML

More BI Consolidation: SAP to Acquire Business Objects
SAP joins IBM as another software company riding the acquisition wave. SAP will acquire BI vendor Business Objects for a price tag of 4.6 billion Euros ($6.8 billion). Business Objects has 43,000 customers and a stake in the on-demand, software-as-a-service market. Earlier this year Oracle acquired Hyperion Solutions, a Business Objects competitor.

Security

SQL injection, buffer overruns, and process injection are serious problems. CIOs, CTOs, system architects, developers, and DBAs need to be aware of the threats. Try our security topic for news, alerts, more information and a list of helpful resources.

SQL Injection Vulnerability with JBoss Seam
Secunia has issued an advisory for JBoss Seam users that warns of an SQL injection vulnerability. The org.jboss.seam.framework.Query class has a flaw that enables a malicious user to exploit the "order" parameter of the getRenderedEjbql() method. Input to the parameter is not properly sanitized to prevent SQL injection attacks. The vulnerability affects JBoss Seam versions before 2.0.0 GA.

MySQL Denial of Service Vulnerability with InnoDB Engine
MySQL installations using the InnoDB engine are vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks by malicious users. The problem is a function in ha_innodb.cc that can trigger an assertion error by the InnoDB engine and crash the server. The vulnerability affects MySQL 4.1.20, 5.0.44 and 5.1.17.

Authentication Vulnerability Affects DB2 9.1
An IBM DB2 9.1 security vulnerability can be exploited to trigger memory corruption or launch a denial of service attack. IBM has released DB2 9.1 fix pack 3a that corrects the problem.

Oracle Employee Arrest for Terrorism Heightens IT Globalization Concerns
Anti-terrorist police in India have arrested an Oracle employee as a member of the LeT terrorist organization and a suspect in recent Mumbai train bombings. The LeT terrorist arrest is one of a series of events, including the HSBC call center fraud and the MphasiS/Citibank scandal, that have marred the IT industry march to globalization.

SSL Auditing, Security Taxonomy
Kevin Dick discusses a security taxonomy of distributed systems in a podcast and video programs released by WebServicesSummit.com. Kevin is CEO of Network Resonance, the company that recently patented a secure SSL auditing technology (more).

At an SDSIC web services conference, a panel of experts discussed security. Topics included browser vulnerabilities, XML injection, SQL injection, and security problems related to federated identities. Presentations and interviews recorded at the conference discuss security issues.

Webcasts and Mobile Video