Control Batch Jobs in Mixed ...

... environment from Windows console. ActiveBatch from Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. in Parsippany, N.J., lets you queue jobs on Linux, OpenVMS, Unix and Windows machines to run at any time and in the correct order, establishing triggers between the successful completion of one job before another kicks off. Version 5 is expected to be ready for delivery the first week of September. It will add Kerberos security and let you create a "job plan" that coordinates numerous jobs into a single entity for easier management. The upgrade will also add new job types, such as customized e-mail messages. Pricing has not yet been determined.

Appliance Boosts Data Warehouse ...

... performance while cutting costs. A tenfold performance jump at half the price. That's the boast from Jit Saxena, CEO of Netezza Corp. in Framingham, Mass., whose Netezza Performance Server (NPS) runs a fast proprietary database on what he calls "commodity hardware." The trick, though, is to push low-cost Intel processors down to disk drives on the appliance for faster response time "so the data is processed where it's being stored," says vice president of marketing Ellen Rubin. Saxena adds that tuning the database specifically for ODBC, JDBC and SQL business intelligence queries improves performance. General-purpose, high-end Unix machines running Oracle, DB2 and even Teradata databases can't compete, he claims. Because it's an appliance, Saxena says, it's "plug-and-play and doesn't require much of that DBA stuff," saving money on operations costs. An NPS appliance can handle up to 10TB of data, but before the end of the year, Netezza plans to double or triple that. Pricing starts at $700,000 for a 2TB machine.

Netezza Performance Server