Featured Article(s)
Risk Management — Prevention is better than cure [Part I]
No risk no gain – an old proverb but not an obsolete one. You can have gains attained at the cost of risks taken; this is true and a universal reality. Whatever your venture is, you have to face many risks on your path. Sometimes it is anticipated but in many cases it is not. Here efficiency matters. One has to have the quality of a clairvoyant who can sense the future and prepare himself for any eventualities are it in personal or a professional one. This is the first in the series of my articles on Risk Management that discuss Risk Management, Risk Management in SDLC processes, its applicability and valuability in a project to drive it towards its success.
Managing A Server Farm
If you’re working with a series of SQL Servers, you know it can be challenging to manage them all. Making sure a script executes everywhere and that you have a handle on configurations, updates and synchronizations can be really tough. If this sounds familiar, you need to check out SQL Farm Combine. You’ll be glad you did, because it helps you manage multiple servers from a single, familiar console. Issue commands, issues queries… it’s all just one console and you can see exactly what’s happening across your servers. Check out SQL Farm Combine to see how it might fit in your shop.
Where’s the Key Master When You Need Him?
I’ve been reading articles from a number of different places, also thinking about all the passwords, the protections we collectively put in place to control access to information on our systems. I think we’re headed for a bit of a crisis (isn’t that an contradiction – "bit" of a "crisis"?) in the not-so-distant future in managing these… keys.
Remember the key master from the Matrix movie series? He had rings and rings of keys – and he alone knew where they went. Sure, for him, it was no problem. But, that’s a single point of failure. If you think about what you may be doing with your own keys, passwords and such, you may find that you’re sort of in this situation as well. We’ve always talked about having passwords and keys locked away, as few people as possible (in many cases, this is one person) with access.
With passwords, encryption keys, local system keys.. there are an increasing number of these things running around. I don’t see it slowing down any time soon, so how are we going to better manage this – how are we going to control access to the data, control access to the keys, but not end up in a situation where we’re not able to get to information in times of crisis? Worse yet, how do we keep from giving too much power to the key master – the one person that holds them all – with out have a distributed model, where we can’t control things?
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Bus, Q2 2006
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Proactive Monitoring & Event Management Solutions for Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase & DB2 UDB
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Improving reliability and efficiency of the Database Change Management
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Top Ten Server Virtualization Technology Considerations
The top ten list provides key guidelines for honing in on the differences between the solutions and helping to understand the… (read more)
ADABAS/Natural Migration to the Cost-Effective Relational Database, DB2 or SQL Server
To cut your Total Cost of Ownership, migrating away from legacy languages and databases is a good start. Blue Phoenix™ DBMSMig… (read more)