IBM has released an updated version of its Informix database with an emphasis on improved performance. In Informix 11.7, IBM is touting a number of performance enhancements. “There are quite a few features that contributed to the performance [improvements]—for warehouse improvement the primary ones were star/snowflake schema optimizations and multi-index scans,” noted Bernie Spang, director [...]

  As amazing as it seems, EMC, the world’s largest independent data storage and protection company, really didn’t have a competitive data warehousing choice in its product portfolio until it bought Greenplum in July. That part of the market, which historically has belonged to Teradata—currently about 70 percent—and, to a lesser extent, Netezza (bought by IBM on Sept. 20 for $1.7 billion), [...]

Ingres has updated its flagship database with new migration, performance and security capabilities in the hopes of winning users over from its competitors. Migration is a key focus of the enhancements in Ingres Database 10, starting with multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) that the company said provides concurrent access to the database. “This feature greatly improves the throughput in [...]

NitroSecurity announced Oct. 9 it had acquired the security business of LogMatrix for an undisclosed sum and plans integrate its risk-based correlation technology to fight cyber-threats. Security information event management vendor NitroSecurity has bought the security business of LogMatrix, bringing new technology into the fold NitroSecurity said will help with risk assessments. Terms of the deal [...]

A survey of 300 IT organizations shows that mainframes remain mission-critical and are likely to be part of any cloud strategy. According to the results of a recent survey, 79 percent of IT organizations consider the mainframe to be an essential component of their cloud computing strategy, said CA Technologies on Oct. 7. If that wasn’t surprising enough, 74 percent believe the mainframe will [...]

All Intel solid-state drives will now ship with Intel data-migration software, a set of hard-disk data transfer utilities, Acronis said Oct. 6. Developed by Acronis, the easy-to-use utilities detect the system’s old and new drives and guide the user through the required steps to clone the old drive to the new. Designed to be quick and simple, the data-migration software transfers all the information [...]

Microsoft Dynamics SL 2011, the company’s ERP solution for small and midsize businesses will be available in the United States and other territories in the second quarter of 2011. Microsoft is also planning a Spanish version to be released at an undisclosed later date. Microsoft Dynamics SL 2011′s dashboards and tools provide insight into projects, inventory, and supply-chain management [...]

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison reiterated his interest in buying a chip maker, but AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said his company is not for sale, though he would listen to offers. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says he is still interested in acquiring more companies—semiconductor makers and software vendors remain high on his wish list—but that doesn’t mean Advanced Micro Devices is up for sale. Maybe. During Oracle’s [...]

  Amazon Web Services is offering a new feature for the Amazon Relational Database Service to help MySQL database deployments scale to meet performance demands on high-traffic Web applications. AWS runs cloud computing services for Amazon. According to the company, the feature—dubbed Read Replicas—is designed to allow customers to create one or more copies of a given MySQL Database instance. [...]

Given all the activity around databases lately with the NOSQL movement, I decided to give a try to some of the new contenders. Lately, I’ve added some object database management systems to SharpToolbox. You can find them all in the DBMS category. I downloaded some of them to see what they look like and determine whether they are stable enough to start developments with them or not. Here are [...]