Why the Telco World Needs a New Form of Cross Data Center Replication
Today’s telco operators have two key needs: the need for their applications and data need to be in multiple physical locations at once to prevent data loss, and the need to respond within single-digit milliseconds to customer requests in order to maintain customer loyalty. But since geographic separation causes latency, there’s an inherent conflict in [...]
What is a microservices architecture?
A microservices architecture is a modular approach to application development that allows developers to deliver large, complex applications reliably and swiftly. Applications—such as those for customer management, charging, or billing—consist of many interconnected sub-tasks that work in tandem to deliver the desired business outcome. In the past, applications were designed as one whole piece—aka a [...]
How VoltDB Complements Vertica for Network Intelligence and Automation Applications
To deliver reliable, fast, and responsive services, providers demand real-time automation informed by actionable insights gleaned from the torrents of data and device telemetry events streaming through their networks. For ages, it seemed that one could have the speed or data granularity in network analytics, but not both, or that one could enjoy both speed [...]
What is real-time billing mediation?
Real-time billing mediation is the process of using up-to-the-second data usage information to proactively identify errors, prevent inaccurate invoicing, notify customers about usage thresholds, and more. Telecom operators and communications services providers use real-time billing mediation to retrieve usage data from different network equipment and convert it to a uniform format that a billing system [...]
Do NoSQL databases need DBAs?
In last week’s blog I questioned the need for DBAs, concluding that yes, DBAs are still valuable in the current data platform environment due to: 1. the need for people who understand the pre-RDBMS database world, and 2. The need for data ‘curators’ to enable rational sharing of data between microservices and to ensure compliance [...]
Whither DBA: Will we still have them in 2026?
I recently fielded a question from a former co-worker who works as a senior Oracle Database Administrator (DBA). I spent much of my career with Oracle, and I’ve asked myself the same question: I am one of those DBAs who can see Oracle's market share gradually being eroded and replaced by a whole bunch of [...]
