Features

• SAP in 2013: Five things to watch

  It was a typically busy year for SAP, with the company making headlines for strong sales of its HANA in-memory database, high-profile acquisitions and aggressive moves into cloud computing.

• PostgreSQL devs lift open source database to enterprise heights

  The release of the first beta of version 9.1 of the open source PostgreSQL database has opened a new era in enterprise-class reliability and data integrity that can compete with the big names, say its developers.

• Open source helps Facebook achieve massive app scalability

  People all over the world spend a total of eight billion minutes a day on Facebook. Some 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared every week, 400 billion Web pages are viewed every month and the site logs a staggering 25TB of data every day. David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, talks about how the social networking giant uses open source tools to achieve its massive app scalablilty.

• No to SQL? Anti-database movement gains steam

  The meet-up in San Francisco last month had a whiff of revolution about it, like a latter-day techie version of the American Patriots planning the Boston Tea Party.

• A greener environment through better data management

  An agricultural research group is encouraging Australian grain farmers to join a National Farming Practices Database, an online central repository which includes detailed growing reports and productivity updates.

• eBeef: RFID from birth to plate

  Computers determine the quality of meat on your dinner plate, long before it turns up on the doorstep of your butcher, and the increasing uptake of technology in the meat industry means armers across the country are liberating themselves from the global financial crisis, the ravages of drought and other environmental problems.

• It takes a quality IT group to deliver good yogurt

  IT infrastructure and services are not the first things to come to mind when you think of Danone Group, the US$3.5 billion company known for its Evian water and Dannon and Stonyfield yogurt brands. But when it comes to packaging and delivering water and yogurt, IT services and the automation they provide are indispensable.

• Deep dive into SQL Server 2008

  SQL Server 2008, aka "Katmai," gives SQL Server shops plenty of reasons to get excited. The best SQL Server release to date, it sports more nice new features than you can count, and the improvements extend to both performance and manageability. In a few cases, such as the Resource Governor, you'll wish Microsoft had taken the functionality a little further. But whether you manage an OLTP environment, or an OLAP environment, or both, you will most likely find Katmai compelling. It easily passes my own five-point test for upgrades.