At IDERA, users drive our product direction. That’s why we have been listening to your needs and have built a roadmap centered around you. In the coming year, we will be hard at work extending our most popular products to support the newest platforms and initiatives that are important to your business. Our top products for DBAs, data modelers, and database developers will be expanding to cover new use cases in hybrid cloud, expanded NoSQL coverage and data warehousing/business intelligence. In addition, we will continue our focus across all the products to bring improved ease of use, better performance, and scalability, along with the industry’s best quality in enterprise database tools. Hybrid Cloud According to a recent survey of our users, 53% of database professionals are managing cloud applications and 25% are using cloud database as a service such as  Microsoft Azure SQL Database or Amazon RDS SQL Server. In the same survey, 52% of respondents identified Cloud as one of the most important technologies to learn more about in 2018. To address these growing needs, we will be expanding our products for Microsoft SQL technologies to provide enhanced management capabilities for companies using both on-premise and cloud databases with a single, consistent approach. Our roadmap  will focus on four specific cloud database initiatives:

1. Cloud database adoption – extending the prescriptive analysis features of SQL Diagnostic Manager, we will examine your on-premise databases and provide you with specific expert guidance that helps you get the most out of your cloud database migration while controlling costs.
2. Cloud database discovery – our leading SQL Inventory Manager product will discover cloud databases under your responsibility, presenting an easy-to-use inventory of managed and unmanaged databases with top health checks to reveal where you need to focus as a database professional.
3. Cloud database performance – with an all-new cloud database dashboard, many new performance and resource monitors, and cloud-optimized query analysis, SQL Diagnostic Manager will enable DBAs to detect and resolve database performance issues in the cloud using the same tooling used for on-premise databases.
4. Cloud database security – DBAs will confidently support new database deployments to the cloud without fearing security concerns with new coverage for Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL Server (Azure SQL Database is supported today).

Expanded NoSQL coverage Every year, data becomes even more critical to business growth and even harder to manage. IDC forecasts that by 2025 the global datasphere will grow to 163 zettabytes, 10x the number in 2016 — and much of this growth is occurring in NoSQL platforms. We know that this data growth and the new database platforms that support it create big headaches for database administrators and developers alike, so we will expand our tooling to support these new platforms so your job is not so hard. IDERA’s database products already support many of the top NoSQL database platforms, such as Apache Cassandra and MongoDB. You told us that you want to manage database development and deployment in a consistent way for all your platforms, both SQL and NoSQL. Our leading product for database developers, Aqua Data Studio, already supports over 28 database platforms and will grow to include several new NoSQL platforms this year. Enhancements planned for Aqua Data Studio this year include:

• Add support for several new platforms from our target list that includes HBase, CouchDB, Apache Drill, and Amazon DynamoDB.
• Expand support for other platforms including MongoDB, Apache Cassandra, and Apache Hive, among others.
• Continue to enhance our MySQL coverage to officially support Amazon Aurora and MariaDB.

With these updates along with other usability improvements, we believe Aqua Data Studio will continue to be the best database IDE with the widest appeal to database professionals of all backgrounds. Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence As more and more companies realize the value of data for making critical business decisions, the prominence of data lakes and data warehouses is skyrocketing. Since the value of this data depends on knowing its meaning, data governance and data architecture have become key disciplines to realize the promise of big data. To help you meet this need, we will significantly enhance ER/Studio, the industry’s leading data modeling, and enterprise architecture suite. ER/Studio will see many upgrades in terms of database platform support this year, including enhanced support for SQL Server 2017, enhanced support for MongoDB and Apache Hive and all new support for Amazon Redshift and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. We are modernizing the product’s parser engine, enabling us to support new and updated platforms faster than ever before. With official support for these new data warehouse platforms, our leading capabilities in data lineage and diagramming will provide critical new data governance capabilities for cloud-based data warehouses. Your Feedback Welcome This is just a glimpse into the many incredible features we are working on in our roadmap for the coming year. There are many other updates coming to other IDERA database tools. We’d love the chance to discuss those with you, so please let me know if you have any questions.