Data never really disappears, particularly when it’s supposed to
May 9, 2013 § Leave a Comment
If you have a teenage son or daughter, you may be familiar with an app called ‘Snapchat’. Its claim to fame – that is, until earlier today – is that it deletes all messages (text, photo, or otherwise) within a few seconds, thus keeping sensitive information safe from the prying eyes of parents, police, marketers, and all sorts of other nefarious characters.
But lo and behold, as it turns out, Snapchat actually doesn’t delete the data after all. Instead, it’s simply moved to a hidden directory, where with proper time and tooling, it can be recovered. You can read all about it here.
Whether or not you’re prone to sharing too much information, the takeaway from this little debacle is that data never really goes away, especially once a smartphone gets involved – not to mention the cloud. Keep that in mind the next time you’re tempted to use technology to record, say, or write something that you don’t want anyone else to see or hear.
Exploring the Database Forest article is now available
May 2, 2013 § Leave a Comment
SAP asked me to write an article that summarized some of today’s most interesting database trends. Here’s what I cover in the article:
I begin by demonstrating that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ database platform isn’t a good idea given today’s complexities. Next, I describe several of the most intriguing new information management technology categories, followed by an overview of how integrated solutions such as SAP’s Real Time Data Platform can provide a logical, unified approach. Finally, I point out that despite all of the fresh breakthroughs and noteworthy new solutions, transactional databases continue to remain at the heart of the enterprise’s information processing responsibilities. This means that selecting an RDBMS will endure as a vital obligation.
This article also served as the foundation for the recent Webinar that I presented as well. You can view the article here: Exploring the database forest
The Seven Fundamentals of Mission-Critical Service Testing
April 9, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Software services – whether SOAP, RESTful, JMS or otherwise, are incredibly important enterprise technology assets that form the foundation of many vital systems and applications. This means that any functionality or performance problems with these services will heavily disrupt your operations.
This makes the job of testing these services more important than ever, yet many enterprises don’t devote the appropriate amount of time, effort, and people to this task. And even when they do, they often don’t follow any kind of formalized testing methodology to help ensure repeatable success.
In this series of Webinars published on the SmartBear blog, I present my take on a set of best practices that you can follow to ensure that your services are production-ready. They include:
- Thoroughly Test Your Services
- Test Using Large Amounts of Realistic Data
- Make Sure Your Services Are Secure
- Get the Most Productivity from Your Developers and Testers
- Fully Track Your Test Results
- Test Your Services Under Anticipated Loads
- Make Sure You Govern Your Services
Here’s a link to the introductory Webinar.
Amazon Redshift – interesting new Big Data Warehouse As A Service offering
March 31, 2013 § Leave a Comment
A while back, I co-authored a White paper about the various storage options offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). In that paper, I described each of the key AWS data management products (e.g. Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), SimpleDB, and so on). I also provided some use cases showing how all of these services can work together.
Amazon continually upgrades and improves its offerings, and they’ve recently announced beta availability for Redshift – a cloud-based service that lets you use the AWS infrastructure to run analytics and business intelligence applications on terabytes – or even petabytes – of information that you upload to Amazon.
In future posts, I’ll be writing more about how these types of hosted solutions have the potential to level the playing field and transform the way Big Data analytics are handled by organizations of all sizes. For now, I encourage you to consider cloud-based products for even the largest business intelligence applications.
Free tutorial on soapUI JDBC TestStep
February 17, 2013 § Leave a Comment
I’ve been writing an ongoing series of blog posts on making the most of soapUI Pro. Here’s the next installment, which explores how to use the JDBC TestStep to evaluate the contents of your database. This is a very powerful capability, because it lets you use soapUI as a complete, all-encompassing quality assurance platform for testing services, Web sites, and databases.
Teaching a workshop entitled “Foundations of Big Data from A to Z”
February 16, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Recently, I blogged about a talk I’m giving in Boston at the Conference on Big Data Security. I’m happy to announce that I’ll also be teaching a comprehensive one-day workshop on Big Data. Here’s what I’ll be covering on Tuesday, July 16:
- A realistic, vendor-agnostic overview of the current Big Data security landscape
- Big Data information management categories including: in-memory databases, key/value stores, graph databases, and file/object repositories
- Examination and explanation of the most widespread technologies such as Amazon Web Services, Big Table, and Hadoop
- Understanding how all of these disparate solutions co-exist without security chaos
- Pinpointing the intrinsic non-technical security risks present in a big data environment: regulatory, legal, industry, and Service Level Agreements
- Creating a “defense-in-depth” approach to protecting Big Data for your shop
- Real-world scenarios on what works and why
If you’re interested, you can register here.
Speaking about enhanced security capabilities for Hadoop
February 11, 2013 § 1 Comment
I’m looking forward to my speaking engagement at the Conference on Big Data Security this July in Boston. I’ll be talking about how to keep your Hadoop environment safe and secure. In particular, I’ll be discussing:
- The key diverse technologies contained within a typical Hadoop environment
- Current and trending security risks characteristic in Hadoop implementations
- Setting and attaining realistic goals
- Contrasting open-source vs. proprietary Hadoop security tools
- Protecting your Hadoop landscape through controlled access
- Inherent differences safeguarding data-at-rest vs. defending data while in motion
I hope you can join me there – it should be a very interesting conference.
