If you're like most enterprises, you have data everywhere. It's in line-of-business applications. It's in directories. It's in various departmental servers. It's in your e-commerce platform. To manage all this, most shops use databases of all sizes running on a variety of operating systems and database applications, often from different vendors and editions. Chances are, they're not consistent.

Oracle's plan to drag its legal fight against rival SAP's defunct TomorrowNow subsidiary through a second trial is not surprising, analysts said Tuesday.

SAP plans to roll out support for the ERP module within its flagship Business Suite product family on the HANA in-memory database platform in the fourth quarter of this year, executive board member and technology chief Vishal Sikka said in an interview Wednesday.

Microsoft has announced a March 7 online event for the launch of SQL Server 2012, the next generation of its database product.

The shipping of Oracle's Big Data Appliance earlier this month could pressure major rivals like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and SAP to come up with Hadoop offerings that tightly bundle hardware, software and other tools, analysts say.

A security researcher today criticized Oracle for neglecting to patch its core database products, noting that the massive update slated for later Tuesday will set a record for the fewest fixes.

Oracle on Thursday rolled out an updated version of its TimesTen In-Memory Database, which is a key component of its upcoming Exalytics appliance as well as a competitor to SAP's HANA platform.

Oracle made a splash on Tuesday when it announced the general availability of its Big Data Appliance, but the company also quietly released pricing information for Exalytics, another new member in its family of specialized hardware-software appliances and a likely competitor to SAP's HANA product, suggesting that a general-availability announcement for that product is imminent.

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.

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.