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.

MongoDB shines with broad programming language support, SQL-like queries, and out-of-the-box scaling

Zoho Writer is an online (with offline and syncing functionality) word processing application that offers a nice amount of functionality, especially given the limitations of the Web as a platform for productivity tools. After creating a free account with Zoho, you can access Zoho Writer. It looks a lot like most word processors, so if you've used any major program in this category, it will take no more than a few minutes of poking around to learn how to do things. This is good, because the "Help" is in the form of a FAQ, not a tutorial or index of functions.

A programmer's editor has to strike a fine balance between being powerful enough for daily use and staying out of the way so you can just look at your code and think. The search for the perfect editor can take years. If you're not perfectly content with the editor you're currently using, you might want to consider Komodo Edit (free). Komodo offers some compelling features at a price that can't be beat.

Intel today started shipping its fastest solid-state drive to date, the 520 Series SSD, sporting its smallest 25nm NAND flash memory and SandForce's SATA 3.0 controller with 500MB/sec-plus performance.

Let's face it: Keeping your PC's drivers up-to-date can be a pain. Several apps, such as PerfectUpdater and DriverScanner, will make this task easier, but they cost $30 each. What if you don't want to shell out any money, and you still want to make driver updating an easy process? The free SlimDrivers can help. This utility isn't quite as seamless as its higher-priced rivals, but it's the best free solution I've tested for identifying and updating outdated drivers.

Don't be fooled by its name: DriverUpdate isn't simply a utility for keeping drivers up-to-date. It handles that task, certainly, but it also does more. This $30-per-year program streamlines the process of updating your Windows OS, as well as those apps, like Java and Adobe products, that frequently seem to be in need of updates, too.

In an era when most cable and satellite TV companies will rent you a fully-functional HD digital video recorder for a few bucks a month, why spend $500 for a TiVo Premiere Elite (which also records high-def video)--plus $20 a month for the TiVo service? (Prices as of January 4, 2012.) TiVo provides four quick no-brainer reasons: tuners. It's the only DVR with four tuners, meaning it can simultaneously record up to four high-def programs--and with 2 terabytes of storage, it also provides plenty of room for all that content (up to 300 hours' worth of HD video, according to TiVo).

Vendors are touting solid state replacement drives as a way to protect corporate data in the event of a laptop being lost or stolen, and to boost performance at the same time.

If you have been considering making the switch from the iPhone to Android, the Galaxy Nexus is a great phone to consider.

Amazon, Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, and MapR mix simpler setup of Hadoop clusters with proprietary twists and trade-offs