A senior database manager at one of the world’s largest banks once told me that the best way to secure Oracle is to unplug it from the wall…and he is probably right. In fact, this holds true for nearly every networked application. Unfortunately, for many of us turning off the database is not an option; we must find another way to...

Optimization is an integral part to science and engineering. Most real-world applications involve complex optimization processes, which are difficult to solve without advanced computational tools. With the increasing challenges of fulfilling optimization goals of current applications there is a strong drive to advance the development of...

This completely practical,...

As night settled on April 20, 2010, a series of explosions rocked Deepwater Horizon, the immense semisubmersible drilling platform leased by British Petroleum, located 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The ensuing inferno claimed 11 lives, and it would rage uncontained for two days, until its wreckage sank to a final resting place nearly a...

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Most people are awash in digital photos—some taken, some received—stuffed here and there in random folders and albums across a hard drive. In The Digital Shoebox, Sarah Bay Williams, creator of the image archiving system used by the Academy Awards®, shares her foolproof method for effectively organizing, finding, and...

Great achievements don’t happen overnight—they evolve over time based on a series of successes that converge and drive you onward. My favorite soccer team, Seattle Sounders FC, started life way back in 1974 in the North American Soccer League and only achieved their recent success in Major League Soccer through working hard to...

The increasing use of computer technology in many areas of economic, scientific, and social life is resulting in large collections of digital data. The amount of data which is created on and stored in computers is growing from day to day. Electronic database facilities are common everywhere and can now be considered a standard technology....

PowerPivot is a lot more than that. When I started the PowerPivot project back in 2007, along with Amir Netz (Microsoft BI Distinguished Engineer), the incubation project was called BI Sandbox. We had been looking...