In Depth

In Depth

Database software

• Mainframe storage: Three players in a market that’s here to stay

  Far from disappearing, the mainframe market and the storage it needs is here to stay for some time. The three key array makers compete with high-end flash-equipped products  Continue Reading

• Storage 101: Crash-consistent vs application-consistent snapshots

  We look at crash-consistent and application-consistent snapshots and backup, how they are defined, the pros and cons of each and the benefits and limits of Windows VSS  Continue Reading

• Coronavirus: How app developers large and small are working to help fight Covid-19

  Computer Weekly looks at how a range of actors are using technology to help mitigate the various impacts caused by the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak  Continue Reading

• Beyond the database: Digging deeper into Oracle’s cloud strategy and its bid to conquer AWS

  Oracle has plenty of ground to catch up on in the cloud infrastructure space if it is serious about going toe-to-toe with Amazon, so how does it plan to close the gap?  Continue Reading

• Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption?

  The rise of non-relational databases has been a feature of the data management landscape in the wake of big data – but to complement or replace relational?  Continue Reading

• How to unlock the true value of data

  With a robust data architecture in place, a firm’s data science team can turn raw data into business insight  Continue Reading

• Sainsbury’s Bank moves data to AWS cloud with Teradata UDA

  Bank decided on a fundamental shift to AWS cloud, using Teradata’s Unified Data Architecture, after it was divested from Lloyds in 2013. Here’s how it built from a new ground zero.  Continue Reading

• Storage 101: Structured data and its storage needs

  Structured data is declining as a proportion of all data but its importance to business applications and its organised nature make its storage requirements very specific  Continue Reading

• Silicon Valley startups home in on pressing value from data

  A slew of California-based startup and early-stage data analytics companies are promising CIOs better ways to get value from their investments in databases and analytics  Continue Reading

• How the Met Office is handling a deluge of data

  ‘Lazy’ open source tools are helping the UK weather forecasting service open up unprecedented volumes of data to all  Continue Reading

• Blockchain starts to prove its value outside of finance

  Technology behind bitcoin is being adopted in supply chains, power networks and even to support independent musicians  Continue Reading

• Australia a hotbed for data analytics

  Market for technologies that help organisations make sense of vast volumes of data is hotting up Down Under  Continue Reading

• Brexit might benefit genomics big data analytics research

  Genomics, an IT-dependent area of medical science research, could yet benefit from Brexit by lower barriers to data acquisition  Continue Reading

• Big data projects need business input and careful management

  Big data projects need to be managed. Ocado and Graydon have been figuring out how  Continue Reading

• A Good American: Surveillance, 9/11 and the NSA

  Computer Weekly sat down to watch Friedrich Moser's documentary about the NSA whistleblower Bill Binney - A Good American  Continue Reading

• Master data management gains ground in UK public sector

  Local authorities and NHS organisations in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland are making slow but sure progress with master data management technology to gain a single view of the citizen  Continue Reading

• Apache Spark grows in popularity as Hadoop-based data lakes fill up

  Apache Spark is growing in popularity and finding real-time use across Europe, including in online betting and on railways, and with Hadoop  Continue Reading

• Hadoop starts to trumpet way through UK public sector

  Big data technology Hadoop is starting to appear in patches of the UK public sector, including GCHQ, HMRC, the Home Office and the NHS  Continue Reading

• CW@50: Spreadsheets and ERP – 50 years of software coding business

  Business software has been a rich field for IT professionals over the past five decades, and we are on the cusp of a new era of customers rolling their own for competitive advantage  Continue Reading

• NoSQL database technology finds use cases, but still minority sport

  From managing water meter data, through Bitcoin and video data, to web publishing, NoSQL database technology is finding real use cases. But it's likely to be stuck at 10% of the market for some time  Continue Reading

• NoSQL offerings from Microsoft and Oracle

  Cloud and big data applications have led to a new wave of NoSQL data stores. We look at what Microsoft and Oracle have to offer  Continue Reading

• For IBM, the answer is Watson. But what is the question?

  IBM is promoting its Watson natural language processing analytics technology as it tries to move its core business beyond technologies that it pioneered, but which have become commoditised. Will it fly?  Continue Reading

• Graph database technology starts to come of age beyond social media

  Graph databases, based on mathematics known for three centuries, are starting to yield value for businesses beyond Facebook and Twitter  Continue Reading

• Graph databases: Joining the dots

  We explore why the growth of graph databases could be pointing the database market in a new direction  Continue Reading

• CW@50: Data management – Five decades of prospecting for business value

  Data management and business intelligence have been at the heart of business value creation for decades. Read about how Computer Weekly has tracked their promise and tribulations  Continue Reading

• Getting dirty with open source databases

  With many companies looking at more agile, open source alternatives to proprietary databases, how do you choose which is the best fit for your needs  Continue Reading

• Genomics big data compels IT to rediscover efficiency techniques

  Genomics is generating big data at such a scale that research institutes such as the Sanger in Cambridge are having to rediscover storage techniques from the past  Continue Reading

• Big data poses storage challenges in Australia and New Zealand

  Big data is like digging for gold, except you must keep every single rock. Computer Weekly unearths some of the main challenges facing those mining data  Continue Reading

• How Asean organisations are untangling big data storage challenge

  If organisations are to benefit from the promise of big data they must get on top of a legal and regulatory minefield when it comes to storing data. How are Asean IT departments navigating this?  Continue Reading

• Spark versus MapReduce: which way for enterprise IT?

  The younger, nimbler Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures. What is the pace, scope and scale of replacement?  Continue Reading

• Finding the right big data appliance for your business

  A big data appliance should be chosen carefully to ensure its value to the business warrants the expenditure  Continue Reading

• Welsh Water billing replacement programme offers customers new tariffs

  Welsh Water (Dŵr Cymru) scooped a Computer Weekly award for a billing replacement programme for which it was its own systems integrator  Continue Reading

• British Gas Smart Metering consolidates data with Qlik on Hadoop

  British Gas Smart Metering has used QlikView dashboards on Hadoop data lake to gain single view of its business  Continue Reading

• CIO interview: CABI’s Andrea Powell on feeding the world

  CABI CIO Andrea Powell says the not-for-profit agri-science data provider aims to solve the world’s agricultural problems with data, structured and unstructured  Continue Reading

• How database virtualisation helped the European Bioinformatics Institute save datacentre space

  The European Bioinformatics Institute recently scooped the award for Best Datacentre Project at the CW European User Awards, and here's why  Continue Reading

• Hotels.com turns to cloud and big data to drive up online holiday bookings

  Online hotel booking site explains how the use of public cloud and NoSQL database tech has benefited its business  Continue Reading

• NoSQL and NewSQL edge into Belgian railways and Austrian yellow pages

  NoSQL, NewSQL and graph databases are finding uses in mainstream European industry sectors from origins in US dotcoms  Continue Reading

• Bill Binney, the ‘original’ NSA whistleblower, on Snowden, 9/11 and illegal surveillance

  Always a patriot: Computer Weekly talks to Bill Binney, the senior NSA official who blew the whistle before Edward Snowden  Continue Reading

• Apache Spark speeds up big data decision-making

  Spark, the open-source cluster computing framework from Apache, promises to complement Hadoop batch processing  Continue Reading

• DevOps spreads into mainstream corporate IT

  DevOps will shift from being a niche approach to application development and deployment, and move into the mainstream  Continue Reading

• Open Data Platform: the answer to a question no one asked?

  What should enterprise customers make of the Open Data Platform, an initiative by IT suppliers to establish common technologies for Hadoop?  Continue Reading

• The reinvention of Dell: What it must do next to succeed

  Two years after going private, Dell still has some work to do to educate the enterprise about what it has to offer  Continue Reading

• How building information modelling is changing the construction industry

  The Cabinet Office says that by 2016, “collaborative 3D building information modelling will be required on all government projects”  Continue Reading

• Travel Corporation finds data fast track with Informatica Cloud MDM

  The Travel Corporation has chosen Informatica Cloud to migrate on-premise systems and data into Salesforce.com  Continue Reading

• SAP bets future on cloud in central and eastern Europe

  SAP’s turn to cloud services for the delivery of its business applications seems especially energetic in central and eastern Europe  Continue Reading

• Review 2014: Top 10 business applications stories of 2014

  This year’s top 10 business applications stories show an increasing corporate IT appetite for better collaboration between organisations  Continue Reading

• Genomics England exploits big data analytics to personalise cancer treatment

  Cancer Research UK and government-funded Genomics England use DNA-sequenced big data analytics to develop personalised cancer treatment  Continue Reading

• Polish banking, energy and public services weigh up benefits of big data applications

  For many Polish institutions big data is still only in the planning stage, but banks and the energy and public sectors are beginning to use the technology  Continue Reading

• Q&A: MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom talks strategy

  Gary Bloom, CEO of NoSQL database supplier MarkLogic, talks to Computer Weekly about strategy  Continue Reading

• In-memory database technology puts Mitie and Wooga in the fast lane

  Mitie uses IBM Cognos running on a DB2 Blu in-memory database taking data from Oracle. And gaming firm Wooga is using Exasol to speed up design  Continue Reading

• Software asset management is key to datacentre planning

  An ordered approach to managing software and hardware assets is essential to maximising your datacentre  Continue Reading

• Soundwave tunes to MongoDB to track music consumption on mobile

  Irish startup Soundwave is using NoSQL database MongoDB to help it track what people are listening to on mobile devices  Continue Reading

• Put digital strategy in command, says Eni CIO Gianluigi Castelli

  Gianluigi Castelli, CIO of Italian oil giant Eni, puts cloud computing in its place and looks to 'cognitive computing' as a wave of the future  Continue Reading

• Unilever puts SAP at the captain’s table

  Consumer goods company Unilever works hand in glove with SAP in “speeding up its growth”, according to senior executives at the two firms  Continue Reading

• The new world of automation

  Business process automation addresses the pace of change in the market by removing human entities wherever possible.  Continue Reading

• In-memory databases - what they do and the storage they need

  In-memory databases offer high performance data processing, but how do you protect data in volatile DRAM and what kind of storage is needed for longer term retention?  Continue Reading

• Cloudera v Hortonworks: Hadoop to complement or replace data warehouse?

  As the market for enterprise Hadoop heats up, the battle lines between two suppliers - Cloudera and Hortonworks - become more clearly defined  Continue Reading

• Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust secures government backing for £6m IT modernisation programme

  CIO interview: Joanna Smith, CIO. Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust  Continue Reading

• Using NoSQL databases to gain competitive advantage

  NoSQL is attracting growing interest from businesses - we examine three case studies: Amadeus, i2O and Temetra  Continue Reading

• The private sector answer to exploiting public sector data

  The big IT suppliers emphasise the importance of transparent governance and maximising the benefits of open government data.  Continue Reading

• Hadoop 2 opens new vistas beyond current UK data management practice

  Hadoop 2 enables a greater range of data-crunching tasks, beyond Hadoop’s previous scope of batch processing, directly within the stack itself  Continue Reading

• Big banks' legacy IT systems could kill them

  A banking T-Rex is dying and nimble competitors will pick at its carcass. Is it too late for the retail bank giants to overhaul their IT and survive?  Continue Reading

• SAP execs predict more innovation as economic outlook improves in 2014

  SAP executives are looking to 2014 as a year to establish the supplier’s innovation agenda of in-memory database technology, cloud and mobile  Continue Reading

• Minerals firm Imerys upgrades IFS ERP as economy lifts

  Imerys has 30 different ERP systems around the globe. A plan to move to a single instance of ERP, thrown off course by recession, was achieved in 2012; other business benefits have accrued  Continue Reading

• BAE builds the business into ERP team for Infor implementation

  BAE Systems Military Air and Information is upgrading and unifying seven ERP systems, with a project team mostly from the business  Continue Reading

• Skillpages develops DataStax Cassandra to rank trades with NoSQL

  How do you find a good tree surgeon you can trust because he or she has been recommended by someone in your social circle?  Continue Reading

• Basho CTO Justin Sheehy describes NoSQL movement as ‘Cambrian’

  Justin Sheehy (pictured), CTO at NoSQL database company Basho, describes the NoSQL movement as ‘Cambrian’  Continue Reading

• Big data journalism exposes offshore tax dodgers

  How journalists harnessed big data to challenge offshore financial secrecy  Continue Reading

• Storage struggles to keep up with data growth explosion

  Big data analysis needs a split from the traditional approach of matching back-end infrastructure to application requirements.  Continue Reading

• How clean is your data?

  Within a transactional system, data rarely appears to be anything other than squeaky clean. Find out why data is dirty, and how to see the dirt  Continue Reading

• Top 10 public sector IT stories of 2012

  There were big moves to reform government IT this year, but despite an appetite for change there are also signs that old habits do not die easily  Continue Reading

• Top 10 business applications stories of 2012

  Connection between information and applications has impressed SAP’s and Oracle’s customers with innovation but assimilation has been tough  Continue Reading

• Aster Data founders explain unified approach to data, big and small

  Aster Data’s founders explain their approach to handling relational data and, within the same engine, multiple forms of non-relational data: the principle of closure  Continue Reading

• Gathering retail intelligence

  Learning their customers’ habits through business intelligence is vital for bricks-and-mortar retailers to stay competitive  Continue Reading

• Big Data: Utilities rise to the smart meter challenge

  The mass of information from smart meters is leading utility suppliers to reconsider how they use their data  Continue Reading

• Data's role in customer engagement

  A combination of traditional business intelligence and big data can help businesses manage information overload  Continue Reading

• Teradata CTO: 'Big data' technology starting to hit the mainstream

  Teradata’s chief technology officer Stephen Brobst reflects on the “big data” landscape, in-memory as hype, cloud data warehousing and mobile consumer intelligence.  Continue Reading

• How to make sense of the big data universe

  Analysing big data can be a daunting prospect, so find out what you need, where it is and how to deal with it  Continue Reading

• Interview: Angela Tucci, chief strategy officer, Symantec

  Angela Tucci, chief strategy officer at Symantec, talks to Computer Weekly about the company's strategic plans  Continue Reading

• 'Big data' MDM processes key to finding business value in new info

  Big data MDM projects encounter a green field in the form of social media. And all big data is enterprise data, by definition. Business leaders will look to IT to derive serious business value.  Continue Reading

• MDM technology still affords chance to make poor software choices

  The MDM market is not so mature that bad choices are difficult to make. Beware the hype of multi domain, and don't expect technology to solve governance problems, in isolation.  Continue Reading

• What IT leaders say about big data

  IT leaders met at a recent Computer Weekly roundtable event, in association with Oracle, to discuss the possibilities and challenges of big data.  Continue Reading

• 'Big data' applications bring new database choices, challenges

  The dormitory world of databases has been roused from slumber by “big data” and associated technologies: MapReduce, Hadoop, MPP, NoSQL. Andy Hayler details big data’s impact and the issues it raises.  Continue Reading

• Do not delay, EU data protection changes on the way

  Three or four years is plenty of time to get ready for the new data protection framework in Europe, but the clock is ticking  Continue Reading

• IT service assurance in a hybrid cloud environment

  CIOs need to ensure they can continue to provide the same levels of service in a mixed environment of cloud and legacy IT  Continue Reading

• CW500: Everything you need to know about big data in 15 minutes

  Harvey Lewis, research director for Deloitte Analytics, discusses the big trends in big data.  Continue Reading

• IT priorities in the downturn

  IT leaders talk to Computer Weekly about how their IT priorities have been shaped by the downturn  Continue Reading

• Computer Weekly / TechTarget IT priorities survey 2012

  Learn which IT priorities are at the top of UK IT managers lists for 2012. Coverage from across our network includes cloud, budget cuts, networking, security, disaster recovery and more.  Continue Reading

• Interview: Mike Lynch on Autonomy at HP

  Mike Lynch co-founded Autonomy and sold it to HP for £7bn. Now he is HP's executive vice-president, information management.  Continue Reading

• CIO interview: Tony Prestedge, COO, Nationwide

  Tony Prestedge took over as COO at Nationwide in 2010, mid-way through a five-year transformation project. He tells Karl Flinders how the company is transforming its business through a £1bn investment in technology, how the IT department changed ...  Continue Reading

• CIO interview: Martin Davies, head of technology at Bet365

  The success story of £5.4bn-per-year online gambling company Bet365 is nothing to do with luck and everything to do with technology.  Continue Reading

• RightNow: Oracle and next-generation CRM

  In his opening keynote presentation at the RightNow Summit 2011 in Newport, Greg Gianforte, RightNow founder and chief executive officer, presented his view of device-aware CRM.  Continue Reading

• Oracle Openworld 2011: Conference coverage

  Read TechTarget’s news coverage, blogs and tips from Oracle OpenWorld 2011. Everything you need to know about the 2011 San Francisco show.  Continue Reading

• Case study: Eaga

  To streamline the surveying process to a single Technical Surveying team. Prior to this, surveys were conducted by different contractors. To ensure data is consistently recorded and systematically transmitted to the Oracle CRM and ERP systems to ...  Continue Reading

• Case study: Rocela Informs and Simplifies Oracle ULA Process for Severn Trent Water

  Rocela helps Severn Trent Water remain confident about compliance and strengthens relationships with Oracle.  Continue Reading

• CES 2011: Embrace IT consumerisation

  Industry gurus are warning that the old ways of doing things cannot continue. The idea of travelling to a place of work, working at least an eight-hour shift using tools that work provides dates back to the industrial age. Productivity was a measure...  Continue Reading

• What is the future for traditional loyalty card schemes?

  Consumers are now better informed than ever, thanks to the richness of information available on the internet. People can find out all sorts of information on products from social media sites, news groups, blogs and the like, along with online ...  Continue Reading

• Buyers Guide to ERP: Alternatives to SAP and Oracle ERP suites

  For smaller businesses, choosing an enterprise resource planning system is a double-edged sword. The products aimed at large multinational companies provide immense flexibility, but can be too complex. Cliff Saran looks at the alternatives  Continue Reading

• Will auditors allow your data to reside in the cloud?

  Do you fear the auditor more or the attacker? A lot of companies fear the auditor more. If you hold data internally, you can show the auditor your controls, but the cloud makes such demonstrations more difficult.  Continue Reading

• Microsoft ramps up Azure with additional datacentres

  Microsoft is ramping up its Azure cloud computing platform with the opening of two more datacentres, bringing the total to six.  Continue Reading