Stories by: Christine McGeever

Companies use a wide range of technologies and products to generate what's known as business intelligence (BI).

Last month, the Dallas Teachers Credit Union (DTCU) went from a customer base of 250,000 professional educators to a pool of 3.5 million potential customers, a change the credit union says gives it a fighting chance against the likes of Wells Fargo Bank and Bank of America, both of which have a strong presence in Dallas.

Oracle customers have been slow to follow the company's exhortation to run their businesses online, and last week's completion of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i appears unlikely to motivate many more of them.

The 66-hour failure this month of an FBI database used to perform background checks on gun buyers was long enough to allow criminals to buy guns, the FBI confirmed last week. It was also the latest example of technical difficulties with a database that's barely 18 months old.

If Oracle Corp. Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison had his way, all of the world's data would reside in an Oracle database. But first things first: Oracle databases need a file management system like the one Microsoft Corp. has in Windows 9x, NT and 2000.

Oracle and IBM are the clear winners among the business intelligence users and Internet companies that fuelled growth in the database market last year.

Oracle is moving its technical support services to the Web, but customers are skeptical that the change will do them good.

The primary vehicle used for querying, reading and updating relational databases is a language called Structured Query Language, or SQL (generally pronounced sequel). Designed for asking questions about information in a database, SQL isn't a procedural language like traditional choices such as Fortran, Basic, C or Cobol, in which you write a procedure that performs one operation after another in a predefined sequence until the task is done. The procedure may be linear, loop back on itself or jump to another point or procedure. In any case, the programmer specifies the order of execution.

Senator Fred Thompson (Republican-Tennessee) last week brought his crusade here for legislation that would require the government to review its security practices annually.

Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp. are the clear winners among the business intelligence users and Internet companies that fueled growth in the database market last year.

The Internet economy's voracious appetite for information has made data a commodity. But the tools for managing that data have always been complex and expensive- characteristics that don't fit the average e-commerce business plan.