Developers can now take a look at the Oracle Database Schema Provider that will plug into Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System, thanks to the release of the first beta of the DSP this week.
Microsoft announced back in February at the VSLive! conference in San Francisco that the Oracle database plug-in to VSTS 2010 would be offered as an option by Quest Software, maker of, among other things, the widely used Toad for Oracle tools. Quest launched the beta of the new tool, dubbed Project Fuze.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 07/23/20090 comments
Red Gate Updates Backup Tool
SQL Backup Pro 6 comes with a new backup compression mode and backup compression analyzer that the company claims can be used to analyze optimal compression levels. The company also said this version comes with the ability to skip initialization if a database has already been through a full backup. Restore operations have been improved, with a "kill existing connections" option during a restore if users try to connect.
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Posted by Michael Domingo on 07/16/20090 comments
When Microsoft released Silverlight 3 last week, there was much attention paid to its ability to support rich Internet applications outside the browser. But what does that mean for data-driven applications?
At the MIX 09 conference back in March, Microsoft announced .NET RIA Services. In a blog posting at the time, Brad Abrams, group program manager for Microsoft's .NET Framework explained:
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 07/16/20092 comments
Microsoft once again is renaming its forthcoming data-oriented cloud services. The company's SQL Services will be called SQL Azure, while SQL Data Services are now called the SQL Azure Database. It's the third name for the platform originally known as SQL Server Data Services.
The company made the announcement today on its SQL Server Blog. The new names do not reflect any changes to the underlying services, Microsoft said. "By standardizing our naming conventions, we're demonstrating the tight integration between the components of the services platform," according to the blog posting.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 07/08/20090 comments
A few weeks ago, Microsoft disclosed it will be issuing a fourth Community Technology Preview (CTP) of its in-memory data caching software, code-named Project Velocity in mid-September.
As reported, that means it will be released to manufacturing later than Microsoft had hoped. But that is no doubt good news to third party providers of in-memory data caching software, such as Giga Spaces, Gemstone Systems, Oracle and ScaleOut Software, and quite a few others who will ultimately find themselves competing with Microsoft’s free offering.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/25/20091 comments
Microsoft's decision to remove the Oracle data provider from its ADO.NET roadmap has generated a lot of buzz, with some saying it was wise for Redmond to cut bait on it, and others wondering whether it's going to mean lots of code re-writing.
As reported yesterday, Microsoft is discontinuing its System.Data.OracleClient. Though it will be available in .NET Framework 4, it will be labeled as "deprecated."
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/17/20095 comments
It looks like there will be another test release of Microsoft's in-memory data caching software, code-named Project Velocity. Microsoft today said it will release a fourth Community Technology Preview (CTP) in mid-September, leading to the conclusion that the company will miss its goal of a summer release to manufacturing.
Announced a year ago, Project Velocity is designed to provide scalable performance of data-driven applications by reducing the number of calls the app has to make to the data source. According to Microsoft, it offers high-speed access to data developed in .NET via partitioned, replicated or local caches. It does so by fusing memory across multiple servers to provide a single, unified cache view to apps.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/10/20092 comments
With the release last week of the Visual Studio 2010 beta and the .NET Framework 4, developers are getting their first peek at Microsoft's next generation IDE. As reported yesterday in RDN Express, many are delving into the new WPF editor. But it also gives developers a first peek at the ADO.NET Entity Framework version 2, which is Microsoft's preferred model for building applications that access databases.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/03/20091 comments
As reported by my colleague Kathleen Richards, the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 bits were released to MSDN subscribers Monday, with the public beta set for release today.
For those developing data-driven applications, the beta is expected to give developers a first look at "Entity Framework version 2" or what Microsoft dubs "Entity Framework 4" As reported, EF 4 adds support for n-tier templates, Plain Old CLR Objects (POCO) and persistence ignorance.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/20/20090 comments
When it comes to Microsoft's Azure cloud services, it seems developers are either quite immersed in the technical underpinnings of Redmond's next-generation platform or they're ambivalent about it.
Microsoft this week showcased some of its customers' various mindsets on cloud computing at its Enterprise Developer and Solutions Conference in New York. The customers -- which include The New York Times, Merrill Lynch, Raytheon and Netsoft USA -- joined Doug Hauger, general manager of Microsoft's cloud infrastructure services, onstage Tuesday during the event's keynote address. Naturally, given the host was Microsoft, they were enthusiastic about the prospects for cloud computing and Azure. But they were tempered in their assessments by concerns over security, privacy, availability, reliability, compliance and other relevant issues.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/07/20090 comments
When Oracle stunned the IT world last week and snapped up Sun Microsystems from right underneath IBM in its $7.4 billion deal, I posed the question:
What will happen to the open source MySQL database platform
? But the bigger question many developers are asking is: What impact will Oracle have on the future of Java?
As the new steward of the Java brand, will Oracle make it a proprietary platform like Microsoft's .NET or will it embrace and advance the existing Java Community Process (JCP) and assure that it does not become fractured? No one will know for sure until Oracle closes the deal. In the meantime, stakeholders are holding their collective breath.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/30/20090 comments
While there is no shortage of questions surrounding what Oracle has in store for Sun Microsystems, perhaps the most intriguing one is what Oracle will do with MySQL. Will it live or will Oracle, which gains MySQL as a result of its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun, throw it under the bus?
There is plenty of reason to believe Oracle would not want to in any way, shape or form let MySQL cannibalize the licensing revenues Oracle has enjoyed for so many years from its flagship proprietary database platform. There's the school of thought that Oracle doesn't walk the walk when it comes to open source.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/22/20090 comments