Charles Garry

I love Oracles licensing policies. I truly do, because it provides me with income as a independent analyst. Companies hire me to help them come up with strategies to take best advantage of Oracles seemingly convoluted licensing rules. Now, Im not bragging here, but more often than not, I find millions in possible savings; the […]

With the recent announced retirement of IBMs Janet Perna, most associated with their DB2 database franchise, it got me thinking about IBMs future in the relational database market. I, like many others, got my first taste of relational technology back in the mid-1980s supporting DB2 on MVS. I remember attending many of the early International […]

The most timely feature of Oracles newest release, 10g R2, has to be Transparent Data Encryption. When you consider all the recent data privacy breaches and their impact on companies (if not customers—yet, anyway) due to compliance with new data privacy legislation, this feature just seemed to leap out at me. TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) […]

With all the recent public disclosures of data-privacy breaches, the spotlight is shining brightly on database security. Databases are clearly under direct attack from hackers on an ever-increasing basis. To paraphrase a famous exchange, “Why do you hack into databases?” “Because thats where the data is!” In recent years we have seen an increasing number […]

IT terms are frequently used in a variety of ways by an array of vendors, co-workers and marketing types, leaving many of us wondering if we even understand what a particular term actually means. Of course, this problem is exacerbated when a niche market explodes into mainstream acceptance, forcing users and vendors alike to poach […]

Just when you thought things might be slowing down, becoming more standardized and easier to manage, the software companies and their willing sacrificial lambs (yes, that would be you) have found new and exciting ways to complicate their lives. And, make no mistake, complexity is the thing everyone craves, yet no one can manage. Sure, […]

The role of the DBA (database administrator) is an important and mostly misunderstood role in many IT organizations. Those of us who have held the position appear to some as geeks who speak another dialect. The language of buffer cache hit ratios and access paths. The database represents that world between the logical and physical, […]