Lisa Vaas

Oracle Corp.s recently reported 15 percent leap over year-ago net income means that the companys yearlong sales force reorganization effort is finally bearing fruit, according to one financial analyst. “The main take-away [from Mondays earnings report] is that Oracle is improving its sales execution on the database side and, most importantly, on the applications side,” […]

Welcome to the promised land. Were finally pulling in to the world of Oracle grid computing. Last week we got Oracle Application Server 10g, earlier today it was Oracle Identity Management, and in early January comes the jewel in the crown: Oracle Database 10g. Now that were finally getting our hands on components of Oracles […]

Oracle Corp. on Monday reported a 15 percent surge in second-quarter profits, a gain it attributed in large part to something not seen in the industry for some time: namely, businesses spending money on software. Oracle, of Redwood Shores, Calif., on Monday pegged net income for the quarter at $617 million. The company earned $0.12 […]

Securing the database is top of mind at most organizations now more than ever. How not? As it is, Slammer slapped us last winter, Microsoft had yet another SQL Server Hotfix patch out as of Friday, and Oracle on Friday put out a high-severity security alert warning of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) vulnerabilities that require […]

It used to be, an Oracle database would ship ready to run on one port. Youd lock that one port down, and youd be reasonably secure. Nowadays, all bets are off, as vendors crank up feature sets and complexity skyrockets. A recently reported, high-level Oracle security vulnerability underscores this problem. This particular vulnerability, which has […]

Reader reaction to a recent commentary, “Tech Job Cuts Slow Because We Hit the Bone,” was that I hit some raw nerves, particularly when it came to my advice to avoid getting laid off. One reader said I had left out cutting your salary by 90 percent, changing your name to (fill in an ethnic […]

This Thanksgiving, PeopleSoft customers across the land should bow their heads and remember Larry Ellison, Jeff Henley and Chuck Phillips in their prayers. Why? Think about it: Who has been kinder to PeopleSoft over the past year? Who has paid more focused attention to the king of Human Resources software? Who has lit a hotter […]

The sort-of good news: A recent American Electronics Association study showed tech job loss dramatically slowed in 2003. AeA projections peg the number of high-tech job losses around 234,000 for 2003, a 57 percent decrease over the year-ago number of 540,000 jobs. The other sort-of good news: According to Michaela Platzer, vice president of research […]

By this time next week, well know whether Comdex has really managed to vanquish the purveyors of massage chairs from its halls, as the Vegas shows reorganization is supposed to have accomplished. In the meantime, DBAs and data-center professionals shouldnt look to Nevada for big news coming out of the database vendor heavyweights—Microsoft, Oracle or […]

Aiming to unsnarl database administrators jobs, Microsoft Corp. revealed one new database tool and major enhancements to another at its PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) Community Summit in Seattle on Wednesday. The tool thats getting a major overhaul is Microsofts ETL (extract, transform and load) technology—known as DTS (Data Transformation Services). The revamped DTS […]

Heres the joke in Oracle Land: Whats the proper way to manage SQL Server performance disruptions? Answer: Turn it off. While Microsofts DBMS has done some slick work recently on TPC benchmarks, its still the butt of jokes like that to many Oracle pros. And you have to admit, it has deserved snickers on the […]

Software developers versant Corp. and Poet Holdings Inc. are merging to provide a line of object-oriented databases to power a broader range of applications than either could on its own. The combined company, which will be known as Versant and was formed last week in a stock swap valued at $26 million, will work on […]