CEO's Connection
Data, Data, Everywhere...
by Rob Gardos, CEO

Data management is, for most organizations, driven by an extremely narrow set of requirements.  If a customer makes an inquiry, you simply need to pull up that customer’s order information to give them sound support.  If an application requires 100 parameters to be configured a certain way to work, one would suspect it would be configured that way.  Companies are experts at managing information in isolated pockets, because the integrity of the overlying function far outweighs the importance of any other value gleaned from the underlying data. More >>

Featured Article
A Cure for CMDB Pain
by Matthew Zito, Chief Scientist

The hype around CMDB is hitting critical mass, as hordes of people convinced they needed a CMDB are now in the midst of implementing one. The CMDB vendors came in, got everyone excited about the prospect of a single source of truth for every piece of technology in IT, and now the reality is starting to sink in. The reality is, of course, that CMDBs are really hard to build and manage.  Step 1 is typically to use an application discovery tool to begin filling in the gaps. More >>

Ask the Expert - Mr. Database
The Agile Database
by Eric Gross, DBA

We all work at companies where, if progress is to occur, applications must be: created, changed over time, and eventually deprecated. Since the database is a central component of most applications, it is critical that changes to the database are handled properly and in conjunction with all related elements. The concepts of development, agility, and database administration come together during a series of steps where incremental improvement constantly forces changes More >>