Since the release 1 of Oracle 11g, Oracle provides the ability to encrypt tablespaces in full, to protect sensitive data inside and accessible from the OS. That is, the objective of this new functionality is not to protect sensitive data of users of the database, but to protect the information of the tablespace datafiles.

To explain the usefulness of this feature, it is best to explain situations in which our data without this functionality would be vulnerable. For example, in the case file of a physical backup of a database tablespace were to wrong hands, could see some data "clear" without problems. For example, a single edition of tablespace (or a simple "cat") containing the Employees table, we show clear varchar2 fields can extract sensitive data (you do not believe, try it!).

In mid March of this year, Oracle announced that will stop developing products for Itanium processor platforms. Noted that other manufacturers were already doing it (Red Hat and Microsoft), and referenced conversations with Intel to justify its decision..

One of the key phases in any Business Intelligence project and in particular the definition of Dashboard is the identification of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These metrics that quantify objectives are closely linked to business processes that measure, but there are standard libraries that proposed KPI's and that can help us to define it better. 

One of them is: https://www.kpilibrary.com/

This library classifies KPI's by sector and business process. Logically, it is necessary to land and adapt to specific business process and performance targets to be achieved at estrategical level, but can be of great help and give ideas to propose indicators derived from those proposed.

Example:

Within the area of ​​human resources and in particular the formation processes, proposes more than 30 KPIs, as shown:

      Average number of training hours per employee

      Average costs per employee training

      Percentage of on-line courses

      Percentage of budget dedicated HR to training

Within SAS solutions focused on improving performance and response time analytic environments highlights the effort with the proposed SAS In-Database. This proposal is accompanied by other high-performance solutions such as Grid Computing and SAS In-memory, which also improve performance, help manage the workload and improve the scalability of analytic environments.

Sometimes we need to check the existence of a table in a script or scheduled task to record error logs, first executions etc ... 

Let us take an example, a package of integration services that normally distribute or run there where we go and that leaves traces in a custom table that is not the default for loading logs. We could always include a performance task or sql script, run right or wrong, as the first to run on the package and then continue. Being purists this just is not quite careful

Anyone who usually look at AWR performance reports to analyze Oracle performance problems, often have their own reading process and approach to all data that shows this report, but I always missed a tool that make easier reading all data.

Hadoop is an Apache project that provides an environment that supports the management of large amounts of data. Such systems are typically used to support the large amount of information generated by great social networks, especially when relational databases are beginning to have problems of scalability, or the cost of growth is too high.

In Oracle 11g release 2, Oracle introduced a new product Oracle Real Application Clusters One Node (Oracle RAC One Node)

This product is an Oracle RAC' s instance but executed in one single node. May be run on different physical servers, not only one (this is common) but a database instance is running only on the same node  simultaneously  (* but we'll see later that this is not completely true).

At the Web Congress in Barcelona, ​​I attended a workshop on Open Data in wich Martín Alvarez Espinar, W3C Spanish Office's head, and Jordi Graells i Costa, coordinator of content and innovation of the Generalitat de Catalunya, explained what is the international initiative Open Data, and how it is developed in concrete projects in some communities of Spain, as Asturias and Catalonia.