Lisa Vaas

With the impending closure of SAPs maintenance window for SAP R/3, users may be nervous about the prospect of paying too much for maintenance or, even more drastically, about migrating to the as-yet murky unknown of Oracles Project Fusion alternative. One things for sure, though: With the growing options for on-demand or software as a […]

Oracle Corp., late to the game when it comes to identity access management, is making up for lost time with its Wednesday announcement of a double buy. The database colossus announced it is purchasing two companies: Thor Technologies Inc., maker of cross-platform provisioning technologies, and OctetString Inc., maker of virtual directory software. Oracle didnt mention […]

A patent has been granted to WorldSync for its method of gluing together the best of peer-to-peer and centralized database replication. WorldSync Inc. makes FileMaker database replication and synchronization tools, the cornerstone technology for which received the patent, the company announced on Tuesday. The companys SyncDek tool remotely synchronizes multiple copies of a file. It […]

IBM has loosed its “Viper” database upon the world, announcing on Wednesday an open beta for the next-generation, native XML/relational data version of its DB2 database. Viper, the code name for DB2s next version, which does not as yet have a final name, has been in alpha testing since June. The company also announced that […]

Zimbra Inc. on Tuesday launched what it claims is the first open-source group scheduling calendar—and with it comes the first publicly available release of its Network Edition, targeted at enterprises. In addition, the companys self-named collaboration suite now supports RSS and Atom feeds, online backup and recovery, hierarchical storage management and clustering for high availability. […]

ANTs Software Inc., purveyor of the self-named high-performance database, is looking to lure MySQL users who are wary of Oracle Corp. applications in the wake of the database giants purchase of MySQL storage engine InnoDB. ANTs on Monday plans to announce that it has added support for MySQL in its most recent update. The update […]

eBay sellers can now set up RSS feeds to tug their customers shirtsleeves when new items are added to their eBay Stores, eBay announced on Thursday on its announcements page. Store owners can now go to Manage My Store>Listing Feeds (within Store Marketing) and click on “Distribute your listings via RSS” to have an orange […]

eBay Inc. on Monday scrapped fees charged to software developers who build sites and applications in an effort to funnel buyers and sellers its way. Membership to the eBay Developers Program is now free, effective Monday. The same goes for eBays new Web Services/unified schema API calls, announced in February, as well as standard application […]

Up until now, the audience for podcasts has been a silent mob, sitting quietly in a darkened theater where advertisers couldnt count their numbers. Audible Inc. has plans to change that, announcing on Friday the first set of tools to accurately measure discrete users of podcasting services. Audible is an online provider of downloadable, spoken-word […]

In the midst of a barrage of criticism regarding its handling of Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is also now facing criticism that its Emergency Preparedness and Response database has lousy security controls. A recent report from the Department of Homeland Securitys Office of Inspector General (PDF download required) states that it has […]

Following in the footsteps of Google Inc., WeatherBug last week launched WeatherBug Labs with the intent of seeding ideas on how to get weather in front of more faces faster—before tornadoes, hurricanes or other natural disasters have a chance to wreak havoc. WeatherBugs parent company is AWS Convergence Technologies Inc., which owns and operates the […]

Exploit code is being circulated that can crash Oracle 10g databases. The code was posted on the Full Disclosure mailing list on Thursday. David Litchfield, a security researcher with Next Generation Security Software Ltd., said that the code is relatively benign in that the exploit crashes servers but doesnt run arbitrary code that might issue […]