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Control is in your pocket
The latest generation of hand-held computers enables mission-critical personnel to be in two places at once.
by Stephen Poole
Nearly every real-time expert agrees that there can be no such thing as a real-time enterprise without mobile and wireless technology. Thanks to advances in data throughput, memory, coverage areas, processor speeds and battery life, hand-held wireless devices such as PDAs and smartphones can now be productive digital tools rather than high-tech status symbols.
Radio frequency identification tags, which track inventory, monitor mechanical and structural components and streamline sales, depend entirely on wireless technology. And companies are equipping an increasing number of employees with wireless devices. In fact, market research firm Ovum predicts
40 million workers will be wireless-enabled in just two years.
Wires out, mobility in
How seriously are business executives taking the move to wireless? If money talks, then the answer is very seriously. IDC, a market intelligence and advisory firm, predicts spending on enterprise mobile data service—which is different from voice communications—will reach $16 billion in the United States next year. In a recent CIO magazine survey, 75% of respondents indicated they're undertaking a wireless project, and 10% are implementing data-intensive wireless access to customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and other types of database applications.
A new mobile technology from Teradata makes it easy to keep data applications running, even when the DBA is away. The new PocketDBA keeps DBAs connected all the time—no matter where they are—and enables them to respond quickly to urgent problems.
That's not to say DBAs don't currently have wireless connectivity—all are equipped with pagers or cell phones so they can be contacted when database issues arise. But after receiving the alert, the DBA must find a landline (modem, digital subscriber line, etc.) to log on to the company's virtual private network (VPN) or intranet.
This situation is more serious than simply asking a DBA to pass up dessert or cut short a child's bedtime story. Experts estimate that unplanned issues such as database downtime, operational glitches and application performance degradation can cost $6,000-$8,000 per minute to as high as $100,000 per minute for certain businesses. This turns a DBA's inconvenient 20-minute sojourn to a fixed-line computer into a major company expense.
The costs don't end there. Being constantly on-call can lead to DBA burnout. Not only is replacing a DBA expensive,
but staff turnover can lead to inconsistent database administration. Database downtime and IT issues, along with potential loss of connectivity to the enterprise, have
a direct impact on service-level agreements and customer satisfaction.
One person, two places
Pepper Lawrence, Teradata senior product manager, says Teradata realized several years ago how important it is for businesses to cut DBA response time. "Several customers told us they thought it would be great to be able to remotely manage the data warehouse with a mobile device," he says. "They wanted to be able to actually push information back to the warehouse—if they had to add a user or add space to a database, the sorts of things a DBA typically does."
So Teradata began work on a wireless project utilizing the Palm VII wireless PDA. The company eventually reached a point where customers could receive database information over the popular hand-held device, but they did not have the ability to perform database management functions. Making the system compatible with the broad range of security architectures on the market further challenged Teradata's efforts.
Enter Ari Kaplan, the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Expand Beyond, a company specializing in mobile IT software. As a DBA at U.S. Robotics in the 1990s, Kaplan quickly became frustrated with the anachronistic system of wireless alerts without the capability of a wireless response. "I felt the pain," Kaplan says. "I was the IT guy dealing with the frustration of being on-call so I could be reached any time of the day, seven days a week, and having to constantly go home or back to the office to fix problems. It didn't make sense to me that you equip IT workers with the ability to get alerts (from anywhere), but not with the tools to actually respond to the alert."
With the arrival of wireless PDAs, Kaplan saw the opportunity to create just such a tool. The result is PocketDBA, a Web/mobile solution created jointly by Teradata and Expand Beyond for use with hand-held devices running Palm or Pocket PC operating systems, newer Blackberry devices, and laptop, notebook and desktop computers. With PocketDBA and the right device, a DBA can receive an alert while ordering lunch and immediately log onto the network and perform the necessary tasks—all before his meal arrives.
PocketDBA's functions are divided into two groups—Sessions Management and Database Management—which comprise nearly every database management function you can imagine for a Teradata Warehouse, from monitoring system performance, batch jobs and automatic updates to running any structured query language (SQL) command or Macro. "We (Teradata) developed the various Sessions and Database Management applications," says Lawrence, "and Expand Beyond created the interface to allow them to work with various hand-held devices."
But because those applications weren't created for Web or mobile usage, Kaplan explains, the Expand Beyond team faced three major problems: performance, usability and security.
"The applications were designed with fast Ethernet connections in mind," he says. "You bring those apps into the wireless world, where data throughput is, at best, 15kbps to 20kbps in the United States, and the actual performance is going to be really bad."
That's where the XBanywhere server comes into the picture. It's a mid-tier server that sits within a company's security perimeter between the data warehouse and the firewall.
The XBanywhere server is where a majority of the processing is done; consequently, there's only minimal data traffic between the server and the hand-held device. Savvy DBAs can create and store frequently used Macros on the XBanywhere server and execute them
just a few seconds after logging onto the company VPN or intranet.
Because the XBanywhere server is the workhorse of the PocketDBA solution, the interface has been designed with the device, in addition to the data warehouse, in mind. The graphical user interface automatically adjusts to the size of the display that the DBA is using, be it a smartphone or a laptop computer. "Let's say you're accessing a database and sending a SQL statement where the answer set might be 10,000 rows. But you can't send 10,000 rows to a PDA," notes Lawrence. "With PocketDBA, the answer set resides on the XBanywhere server, and you can navigate and search through the result set."
Security everywhere
But perhaps the biggest issue surrounding mobile database management is security.
In the aforementioned CIO survey, half of the respondents cited security as the biggest roadblock to adopting wireless projects. For PocketDBA, Expand Beyond has delivered maximum security without requiring customers to use proprietary security architecture. "We use the same security authentication as a desktop Teradata user is accustomed to—there's no need for additional user names or passwords because they're the same as the database user name and password," Kaplan says.
Secure Sockets Layer technology is used to encrypt the HTTP packets sent to and from the mobile device (the packets can be encrypted up to four times as they travel to the XBanywhere server). PocketDBA works with many wireless VPN solutions to provide another security layer, and it is also certified RSA SecurID ready.
Worried about data falling into the wrong hands if a wireless device is lost or stolen? No need; database information is kept on the XBanywhere server, not on the device. Sessions automatically terminate after a designated period of non-use. This design also means you won't lose work due to dropped signals. Simply reconnect, and you can pick up where you left off.
Exciting stuff, to be sure, but the good news is that PocketDBA is merely the tip of the iceberg for what the XBanywhere system can do to enhance a company's Teradata Warehouse. It takes the real-time enterprise dream and makes it an achievable reality.
"XBanywhere is very robust middleware that can be applied outside of IT," says Kaplan. "So if there are customers out there who want to make a Web-based or a wireless mobile-based extension of their applications, they can work with Teradata Professional services to create their own unique solutions."
Stephen Poole has written about computers and technology for a variety of U.S.-based magazines since 1988.
© Teradata Magazine-June 2004
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