* Tools that increase the efficiency and security of your databases and applications
One of the great things about the IT industry is that there’s no shortage of innovative companies coming up with a wide range of products to address niche problems. Today’s article covers a compendium of tools that increase the efficiency and security of your databases and applications and the business processes that use them.
SQLNitro from DBA24Hrs compresses database packets so you can send data more efficiently across the network. Think of it as network acceleration for SQL Server. The traffic between a client device and the database is compressed 65% to 80%, depending on the data. So, for instance, you can get 25GB down to just 2.5GB to go across the network much more efficiently.
SQL Server data and commands travel in packets called Tabular Data Streams (TDS). The TDS packets are transported over the network in TCP packets that typically have a lot of wasted space. SQLNitro squeezes out that wasted space so that only the actual data travels down the line. Consequently, application performance increases by 50% to 75% because the data travels much more quickly. This technique is helpful for speeding up application performance over LANs, WANs and the Internet, and it’s especially good for remote access to the database. Moreover, the data is encrypted, so SQLNitro increases security as well as performance.
The SQLNitro software sits between SQL Server and its clients. You don’t need to put the software on every PC. The vendor recommends you install it on your power users’ PCs. The cost is $495 for the server software, and $495 for each client, with discounts for volume purchases.
Another database efficiency tool comes from Terracotta. This company’s network-attached memory brings scalability to Java applications. Terracotta’s target market is generally the mid-to-large enterprise with database applications that have huge scalability needs.
Now, I’m not a database or applications development expert, so exactly how Terracotta works is too complicated for me. However, even I can comprehend the usefulness of a product that provides a “scratch pad” area that holds temporary data until you need to write the final data to the database. Sometimes the scratch pad is much larger than the actual data. Without Terracotta, you would be buying additional instances of your database product (i.e., expensive Oracle CPUs). With Terracotta, you don’t need to store your temporary information in the database; you store it in memory.
Terracotta offers two value propositions. One is the savings on additional database license. For example, one customer spent $200,000 to buy Terracotta vs. $2 million to increase its Oracle license. The other value proposition comes in the form of the time expended by your highly skilled and very expensive data management layer developers. Terracotta creates an infrastructure layer to hold the temporary data. Many developers write this very complex layer themselves. By adding Terracotta, the developers can save the time and complexity of doing it themselves, helping you develop your application that much faster.
Transparency Software makes an appliance called the Transparency Vision Server, the purpose of which is to enforce database auditing and compliance through information policy management. For the first time, data managers have an automated means to examine the relationships between users, applications and data. Transparency calls this process business activity management, or BAM.
BAM takes the mystery out of what is happening with the information being used in a business process. It allows you to audit every step in the process, and detect when something abnormal (i.e., against policy) happens.
For example, one of Transparency Software’s customers is a social networking site that manages a vast amount of personal information about its members. This company uses the Transparency Business Server to monitor and alert on situations where the information is being accessed in a way outside the normal scope of regular business activity. It puts the access of data in a business context, not just a technical context, which helps improve data security and compliance with regulations like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley.
