After Oracle and Hewlett-Packard enjoyed a long and fruitful partnership in enterprise IT, it's hard to find anything that hasn't gone wrong with their relationship over the past two years.

Ann Livermore, a member of Hewlett-Packard's board of directors and a longtime head of the company's enterprise business, will be the first witness called when a court in San Jose, California, hears HP's lawsuit against Oracle for ending future development on the Itanium platform.

The next version of Oracle's database will be released in either December or January, CEO Larry Ellison said during an onstage interview at the AllThingsD conference in London.

Oracle may lay out how it plans to become a player in the burgeoning PaaS (platform as a service) market next week during a webcast event featuring CEO Larry Ellison and co-president Mark Hurd.

Due to incorrect information provided by the vendor, the story "SAP puts its HANA in-memory database in the spotlight," posted to the wire on May 16, contained an improper characterization of the hardware used in a database cluster set up by SAP.

Investors have taken note of the surging enterprise demand for tools that can manipulate and analyze massive volumes of structured and unstructured data.

Yahoo has joined a growing list of companies offering big data analytics as a service with its Genome offering this week.

SAP seems to be betting its future on its HANA in-memory database, spotlighting the technology once again at the Sapphire conference in Orlando Wednesday, announcing a slew of new applications, partnerships and functional enhancements for the system.

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.