Charles Garry

I was walking around the vendor showcase floor at a recent conference and was amazed at the number of vendors pushing compliance-related themes. Thats not all that surprising I suppose when estimates have pegged compliance spending at more than $15 billion annually. Compliance after all is one of the easier sells because it is by […]

We all love a good survey. I especially like those little survey factoids they have in USA Today that provide useful information like how many gallons of water got flushed during commercials on “American Idol.” I often wonder how useful survey data is. To the uninitiated, a survey seems like cold hard data—”just the facts, […]

I have never been a big fan of ILM (information lifecycle management)—the term, not the concept. This is mostly because the concept is so broad but the term itself seems so limiting. When people hear ILM they think information, which reminds them of data. They think of data and it reminds them of storage. Next […]

Oracle is out to stop the open-source movement. Specifically Oracle, is out to kill MySQL. This seems to be the mindset of the unseen, Slashdot-posting, no doubt Birkenstock-wearing group of open-source zealots concerning Oracles recent moves. Actually, to be fair, when I spoke at the MySQL conference a few years ago, I didnt see a […]

So IBM finally showed some signs of life in the distributed space when it offered DB2 Express-C as a free download. As I noted in a previous column, IBM desperately needed to shake up the status quo in the Unix, Windows and Linux database market. Bless them if they didnt finally make a move. Now […]

In a move to “simplify” pricing and create hardware “parity,” Oracle has announced once again that they have changed their database pricing for the second time in less than six months. After listening to Jacqueline Woods, Oracles vice president of pricing and licensing on a conference call explaining the latest policy shift, it seems clear […]

The race to the top of the economic ladder is on, as jobs are increasingly becoming digitized and therefore virtualized, enabling knowledge workers from all over the globe to compete for coveted high-paying positions. The Internet, broadband access and open standards have broken down geographic and political barriers, enabling companies to freely move operations not […]

Sometimes its easy to think that the database universe is made up of only five or six players, depending on who you talk with. But that is far from the reality. The market is bursting with dozens of database choices, but most of us go happily about our daily tasks, confident that we have a […]

Database archiving, to me, is a no-brainer. I have held this opinion since 2002 when I first came across some vendors in this space and after speaking with organizations that had implemented a database archiving solution. Indeed, I had also predicted the database or structured data archive market should reach $240 million by the end […]

In a recent article, I stated that people should be cautious in upgrading to SQL Server 2005. Some irate readers have taken that to mean that I think there is nothing worthwhile in the new release. I can understand why, based on the title and the initial subtitle (which was subsequently changed), a cursory glance […]