Db trends final

Editor's Notes

1. As we discussed, the infrastructure that may be needed to provide a specific service or create a new business model can be very complex. This complexity can be evident both physically and logically. In addition, this infrastructure may change rapidly as the business changes. The first steps in managing a critical business service surround identifying the specific infrastructure that the service needs to run. Essentially, we need to map out the path that the business transactions travel along to better understand how to manage the service. (next)
2. Depending on what business model is being adopted, a company may be required to integrate into a “virtual” enterprise to deliver specific services or business models. For example: If an organization has acquired an EProcurement application such as Ariba, the “service” will extend into more than just the “in-house” enterprise. You would want to manage the supplier’s system (as it relates to the transaction). You would want to have information from the Shipping company, etc.. No longer can we only think in terms of the “enterprise” we must always look further to determine if the service in question requires integration to a virtual enterprise and determine where management makes sense. Now, we will present the BMC Software approach to Systems Management in this new Era. (next)
3. Internet commerce services fail many times because there are weak infrastructures supporting them. 1.) Unreliability - The best of the largest retail e-commerce sites achieve 99.4% availability (Keynote Systems, benchmarker). The worst sites achieve only 86.7% availability and costs retailers millions of dollars in revenues. 2.) Complexity - If something crashes, it can take IT personnel hours to figure out where the problem is - routers, servers, operating systems, middleware, etc. 3.) Fragile - Simple upgrades and bug fixes can leave systems in limbo for weeks while IT personnel figure our which configurations won't crash every few hours. 4.) Vulnerable - Infrastructure today still has weaknesses in which a single event can bring down an entire system. For example, standards on single machine types, like NT, leave whole web sites vulnerable to viruses.
4. Unplanned outages - unexpected problems. End up having to recover the environment: the longer the recovery, the longer the unplanned outage becomes. Point to customer : Industry is focused on unplanned outages on open systems and trying to minimize number of surprises in the environment. Most companies say that more outage time is spent on planned outages than on unplanned outages. Planned outages are driven by change in the environment. This is becoming a much larger issue for customers. If you could reduce the amount of time on the planned outages, you can have a significant impact on the amount of downtime. BMC is the only vendor in industry that focuses on both planned and unplanned outages, and can reduce the overall impact of outages from an application perspective for a customer.
5. Unplanned outages - driven by problems Element failure Performance degradation Capacity limitation Application logic error Transaction backout Data corruption Planned outages - driven by change Database maintenance Application migrations Configuration upgrade Data propagation Source of 70% and 30% is CIO feed back during Customer briefings and meetings.
6. There are two methods of accessing your DB2 databases using Java: JDBC SQLJ
7. XML is getting a lot of publicity these days. If you believe everything you read, then XML is going to solve all of our interoperability problems, completely replace SQL, and possibly even deliver world peace. Okay, that last one is an exaggeration, but you get the point. In actuality, XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. The need for extensibility, structure, and validation is the basis for the evolution of the web towards XML. XML, like HTML, is based upon SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) which allows documents to be self-describing, through the specification of tag sets and the structural relationships between the tags. HTML is a small, specifically defined set of tags and attributes, enabling users to bypass the self-describing aspect for a document. XML, on the other hand, retains the key SGML advantage of self-description, while avoiding the complexity of full-blown SGML.
8. XML provides a standard for data interchange. By incorporating XML into DB2 you can more directly and quickly access the XML documents. With DB2 you can search and store entire XML documents using SQL. You also have the option of combining XML documents with traditional data stored in relational tables. When you store or compose a document you can invoke DBMS functions to trigger an event to automate the interchange of data between applications.
9. However, there are some problems with XML. For example, standard web browsers do not currently understand the descriptive tags. This problem will be alleviated in time as XML-capable web browsers come to market. Another problem with XML is not really the fault of XML, but of market hype. There is a lot of confusion surrounding XML in the industry. Some folks believe that XML will provide metadata where none currently exists or that XML will replace SQL as a data access method for relational data. Neither of these assertions are true. There is no way that any technology, XML included, can conjure up information that does not exist. Humans must create the metadata tags in XML for the data to be described. XML enables self-describing documents. It does not describe your data for you. And XML does not do what SQL does. Hence, XML cannot replace SQL. SQL is the standard access method for relational data. It is used to “tell” a relational DBMS what data is to be retrieved. XML is a document description language. It describes the contents of data. XML may be useful for defining databases, but not for accessing them.