Lockwood Lyon

For the entrepreneur who wants to implement a significant digitally-based service or sell products to customers on-line, the need to get the application written and implemented quickly is a strong one. The thought of creating and maintaining an information technology infrastructure is daunting. Purchasing hardware, finding a space with appropriate power requirements, installing software, managing […]

For most companies, IT-related hardware and software maintenance is costly, time-consuming and requires hiring and retaining a support staff of operating system and database management system specialists. Delegating these responsibilities to an outside firm allows a new application to be developed and implemented more quickly. Enterprises also consider this possibility as a way to purchase […]

Vendors now offer Database as a Service (DBaaS) as part of a bundled solution of managed IT services. The selling point is that businesses will not need to purchase and install database software, create and maintain databases, hire database administrators, or worry about upgrades and scaling up when their business expands. Delegating database management services […]

The Database Administrator (DBA) is usually a technical professional who supports one or more hardware and software platforms that provide application solutions. However, technical details such as SQL tuning, hardware and software upgrades, and database designs tend to be tactical in nature.  It is essential that the DBA also maintain a strategic outlook in order […]

Big data applications were once limited to hybrid hardware/software platforms. Now, recent advances are allowing applications like these to be integrated with and federated into operational systems. In particular, IBM’s DB2 for z/OS Version 12 (DB2 V12) delivers new features and functions that allow the DBAs to design, define and implement very large databases and […]

Your big data application needs regular extracts from your production systems. While many best practices exist for big data extract, transform and load (ETL) processes, we sometimes forget that these data-intensive procedures can affect the operational environment’s performance. Big Data Application Resource Usage Today’s big data applications are scaling up and out. This involves adding […]

Big data applications start big and keep growing. As the masses of big data being analyzed grow both in size and complexity (think XML data, binary large objects or BLOBs, and URLs of internet page visits), the hardware and software communities have responded with huge storage offerings and massively parallel storage and retrieval mechanisms. The […]

While the performance of a mission-critical application sometimes takes center stage, IT staff are always aware that the performance of the overall system affects all applications.  Database management systems, operating system software, physical data storage and retrieval, and backup and recovery operations all take part in providing a solid infrastructure for applications. For many customer […]

Assume you’ve been given a directive by IT management to “tune” things. What strategies are available and how do you judge which ones are best? Considering the current economic climate, can any be implemented on a shoestring budget? Can any of these tasks be assigned to resources with basic DBA skills and still be productively […]

Big data is here, and fits nicely into an organization’s data warehouse infrastructure. Most large IT enterprises have installed one or more big data applications. These applications provide fast access to large stores of data, usually customer or sales data. Your technical staff that supports these applications and the systems that analyze and consume the […]

Early data warehouse implementations began as collections of financial and customer data that were accumulated over time. This allowed for historical reporting and some trend analysis.  Modern warehouses have evolved into complex and elegant enterprise analytics platforms, hosting a broad collection of multiple data types, queried by advanced business intelligence software. Every day more data […]

Each new release of DB2 for z/OS contains “autonomic” features that allow the subsystem to diagnose potential issues in real-time. These include the gathering of data distribution statistics in real-time, the ability to reorg databases based on performance criteria, and other functions included in the new DB2 Autonomics Director. However, it is still possible for […]