The release of the public betas of the first Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Framework service packs last week is an important milestone for database developers looking to bring Microsoft's newest data access technologies into production.
As reported last week, the beta of the first .NET 3.5 service pack includes updates to the ADO.NET Entity Framework for mapping object and relational data and ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named Astoria), a framework for building on-premise REST-based data services, layered on top of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/21/20081 comments
The SQL injection saga first
outlined here last week
continues in the form of new attacks, while others are talking about what developers need to do to minimize their exposure.
The Shadowserver Foundation, a volunteer watchdog consortium of security pros who track various threats, today reported that the latest SQL injection exploit is affecting the "winzipices.cn domain name." According to today's posting by Steven Adair, the attack has hit more than 4,000 pages.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/07/20086 comments
Reports
that the latest SQL injection exploit may have impacted hundreds of thousands of sites running IIS and SQL Server in recent days has put Microsoft, once again, on the defensive. Redmond's tacit response: database developers are holding the bag on this one and need to clean up their act.
There are no new vulnerabilities in SQL Server or IIS, wrote Bill Sisk, a communications manager for Microsoft's Security Response Center, in a blog posting Friday. "To protect against SQL injection attacks the developer of the Web site or application must use industry best practices," Sisk wrote.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/30/20089 comments
With Microsoft's announcement late last week that it
will release SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (SP3) this summer
, it begs the question: What's the status of SQL Server 2008?
Officially, it's still on track to be released to manufacturing in the third quarter and Microsoft officials say nothing has changed on that front. But some say they won't be surprised if the RTM actually slips again into the fourth quarter.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/23/20080 comments
When contributing editor John K. Waters showed up at yesterday’ annual
MySQL Developers conference
in Santa Clara, Calif., he was struck by the large percentage of women in attendance.
"Take it from a guy who has been attending these events for a decade and a half," he said to me in an e-mail. "There were more women at this conference than I've ever seen at a tech trade show."
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/16/20080 comments
Is enterprise adoption of open source database servers on the rise? They are certainly making headway but are facing challenges,
The Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required)
reported yesterday.
The Journal points out what most enterprise database server geeks already know and that's the fact that they still account for a small slice of the $21.6 billion (Gartner's forecast for 2008) database server market. IDC database guru Carl Olofson told WSJ that mostly midsized companies that don't need some of the higher end features of enterprise database servers tend to be the users of open source database servers.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/09/20081 comments
I attended the
Linux/Open Source on Wall Street
conference yesterday in New York and was intrigued to hear Monica Kumar, a senior director for open source product marketing at Oracle, talk up her company's competence in helping organizations move to Linux and work in development environments such as Eclipse. "Our customers are adopting open source and are demanding our technologies support open source," Kumar said during the opening panel session.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/02/20082 comments
Sybase may be the perennial forth largest supplier of enterprise database servers in a three database race. But its databases still have clout in a number of key industry segments, including telecommunications and financial services.
Yet last week, all of the attention on Sybase went to its new iPhone support and the fact that it seems to have gotten a respite from Sandell Asset Management Corp., which holds 6 percent of Sybase's shares and has been in conflict with management over ways to improve shareholder value. Without getting into the gory details, Sybase has agreed to purchase $300 million of its own common stock
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/26/20080 comments
My colleague, senior editor, Kathleen Richards was at MIX08 in Las Vegas two weeks ago. Suffice to say she received a brain dump on Silverlight and a number of other big announcements there. When she called from Vegas, my first question was, how's Silverlight? It was quite impressive, she said, adding that there was another big surprise: Microsoft launched at MIX08 SQL Server Data Services, or SSDS.
"Is it a hosted version of SQL Server," I asked her? It's a cloud-based repository service that will offer APIs that enable storage in the cloud, she said (which she also wrote in her subsequent report).
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/19/20081 comments
Does cost drive the decision of what database to deploy? And are the business owners getting the final (or increased) say on that choice? According to Jeremy Lehman, the former chief software architect for Citigroup's global equities group and now founder of New York-based Radical Analytics, cost certainly is an issue in the capital markets sector. And it's the business managers who are raising the issue, said Lehman, who gave his observations during a session at Microsoft's Financial Services Developers Conference in New York yesterday.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/13/20081 comments
Having a tough time installing the latest CTP of SQL Server onto a local system? I ran into Lenni Lobel, a principal consultant at
twentysix New York
at the Heroes Happens Here launch event in New York and you'll be glad to know you're not alone.
At the partner pavilion during the launch, Lobel was confronted by several would-be testers and learned that a number of them were struggling as well. Some people even gave up. Lobel, who admits he was initially stumped himself, said he searched around and found no documentation on the issue. So he hacked away and ultimately discovered during the installation process when the dialog box comes up where you are supposed to specify the service accounts, you should type "L" for local. "I plugged away at it until it gave," said Lobel, who is also plugging away on a SQL Server 2008 book.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/05/20080 comments
When Sun Microsystems this week announced that it
completed its deal
to acquire open source database vendor MySQL , the company set the stage to over promise and under-deliver. As
I wrote last month
, there’s plenty of reason this deal has a lot of promise -- but at a $1 billion price tag for a company with a fraction of the revenues, Sun needs MySQL to be a blockbuster to pay off.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/28/20080 comments