Introduction

Abstract

Enterprise applications are defined by their need to collect, process, transform, and report on vast amounts of information. And, of course, that information has to be kept somewhere. Storing and retrieving data is a multibillion-dollar business, evidenced in part by the growth of the database market as well as the emergence of cloud-based storage services. Despite all the available technologies for data management, application designers still spend much of their time trying to efficiently move their data to and from storage.