Charles Garry

You are likely to be a member of your organizations stealth IT group whether or not you are aware of it. If you have a desktop or laptop PC and a way to extract data from other sources and populate a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, then chances are you belong to this less than exclusive club. […]

Last week I participated in an IT executive roundtable in New York, where we asked the audience what subjects were currently top of mind. The initial talking points for the roundtable were both security and open-source software, but, clearly for this audience, security was the more dominant issue on their minds that day. Now, that […]

I admittedly was caught off guard at Oracles recent acquisition of Innobase, makers of a transactional storage engine that works under the covers of MySQL, the popular open source database. Many have speculated about the dark and terrible plans Oracle has to destroy MySQL. Well, I have to say: give me a break! Oracle is […]

If you are like me, you have probably followed the entire discussion around grid computing with a detached sense of curiosity: a feeling that the idea sounds cool but in practicality seems more science fiction than science. When we add the fact that every vendor seems to want to bend the notion of grid computing […]

The agile infrastructure. Just the phrase conjures up images of gazelles running or contortionists bending themselves into pretzel shapes. Come to think of it, I actually watched a man fold himself up and get locked in a glass trunk at a conference last year. I wasnt thinking agile at the time. My thoughts were more […]

Im attending a conference this week, and I am watching a well-respected academic present his vision of the agile enterprise. He advocates clever new perspectives that organizations should utilize to better respond to change as it happens. He reasons that no company can predict the future, but what they can do is build a company […]

I wish every CIO and CEO of a major corporation had the opportunity to attend the Teradata Partners conference. This year marks the sixth Partners I have attended, and the thing that always impresses me is the fact that for about three days, its like you stepped through the looking glass. I say that affectionately, […]

I have kids playing fall baseball and softball. I volunteered to keep score, mostly because I read Moneyball over the summer and I became fascinated with all the statistics that baseball keeps. Wouldnt it be great if we had some sort of statistical history to tell us which software is better than the other? Of […]

The long expected acquisition of Siebel Systems by Oracle was finally announced today. Somehow I dont expect the same cries of despair we heard from all concerned parties when Oracle was going to acquire PeopleSoft. Perhaps the market had already seen this as inevitable. Perhaps PeopleSoft was just one of those beloved software companies that […]

Microsoft hates DBAs. Ask anyone. OK, ask anyone who is a DBA, especially those who dont really support SQL Server. I have attended my share of IOUG and IDUG conferences in my day. I always enjoyed the performance-related presentations where one could debate the relative impact of locking scenarios and dynamic versus static SQL, or […]

I saw a recent online poll asking the question “Will automation make the DBAs job obsolete?” Over 73 percent of the 726 people who responded felt that automation would never make the database administrators job obsolete. No surprise really, since the poll was taken on a site that caters to DBAs. The interesting fact is […]

Is it just me, or is there a new security vulnerability every day? Oracle seems to be taking the brunt of things in the database space, while Microsoft continues to have its Windows vulnerabilities dragged through the muck and mire that is IT media. Ok, well, perhaps I am being a bit melodramatic—there really isnt […]