Big data, crystal balls, and looking glasses: Reviewing 2017, predicting 2018
It's this time of year again, when crystal balls meet data. Here's what's kept the data world busy in 2017, and will most likely continue to do so in 2018.
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Databricks is no longer playing David and Goliath
Over the past year, Databricks has more than doubled its funding while adding new services addressing gaps in its Spark cloud platform offering. With the recent Azure Databricks deal, Databricks gains a strategic partner that could level the playing field with Amazon, Google, and IBM.
The paradox of cloud data: it saves money, but can be costly, too
Survey shows IT managers no longer worry about cloud security, cost is now the big concern.
Uber says data breach compromised 380K users in Singapore
Ride-sharing company reveals 380,000 in Singapore were affected by the massive data breach that compromised 57 million accounts globally, but says no fraud or misuse has been tied to these users.
Oracle Q2 strong on cloud, SaaS momentum
The company churned out strong cloud revenue growth with its autonomous database on deck. But total cloud growth in the third quarter will be tougher due to the anniversary of the NetSuite purchase.
StreamSets updates ETL to the cloud data pipeline
Real-time streaming has moved the center of gravity for data transformation off the cluster to serverless data pipelines. Cofounded by veterans of Informatica, StreamSets is providing a third-party alternative in a landscape populated by cloud provider dataflow services.
Culture, automation and self-service: The keys to big data success
Sumit Nijhawan, CEO and president at Infogix, outlines why many big data projects fail, and how companies can make the most of their investments in this area.
Australian government unveils open data framework for cities
The government has launched a database with innovation, digital opportunities, governance, infrastructure, investment, sustainability, jobs, skills, and housing information on the nation's most populous cities and regions.
Going data-driven on a budget
How can you think and do data analysis globally, aiming to act and have an impact locally, when the data you need is scattered and incomplete and your resources are limited? And what does an analysis on the affordability of data plans around the world show?
AWS re:Invent Big Data spotlight shines on global footprint and storage access
With Google Cloud Spanner and Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB in its sights, global scale and resiliency were key big data themes at re:Invent.
Real-time applications are going places
Data streaming is the paradigm behind applications that can process data and act upon insights on the fly. Apache Flink, one of the key platforms in this area, is releasing new versions and getting traction. But there may be other players in this game soon, and not the ones you think.
AWS rolls out new graph database, more database functionality
At re:Invent, Amazon Web Services unveils new services for Aurora and for DynamoDB, along with Neptune -- a fully managed graph database.
AWS re:Invent 2017: Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL headlines pre-show announcements
In the weeks leading up to re:Invent, Amazon has already a stream of data platform-related announcements. Early announcements, focused on gap-filling and feature extension, provide the context for what Amazon will be announcing this week.
Black Friday deal: Get CloudBerry Backup Server Edition for $84
Normally $120, this ZDNet exclusive lets you back up to the cloud-storage destination of your choice.
Singapore C2C marketplace turns to AI to combat fraud, improve UX
Carousell is looking to use artificial intelligence and machine learning across the organisation, tapping the technology to mitigate fraud risks and enhance user experience.
Uber says unauthorised transactions in Singapore not linked to global breach
Uber has dismissed suggestions that a spate of unauthorised transactions reported by customers in Singapore is related to its global data breach, which does not involve financial information.
Hybrid transactional analytical processing
Traditionally, operational databases and platforms for data analysis have been two different worlds. This has come to be seen as natural, as after all the requirements for use cases that need immediate results and transactional integrity are very different from those that need complex analysis and long-running processing.
Insight Platforms as a Service
Remember how we noted data is going the way of the cloud? While there are no signs of this slowing down, there's another interesting trend unraveling, the so-called Insight Platforms as a Service (IPaaS). The thinking behind this is simple: if your data is in the cloud anyway, why not use a platform that's also in the cloud to run analytics on them, and automate as much of the process as possible?
Streaming becomes mainstream
The endless streams of data generated by applications lends its name to this paradigm, but also brings some hard to deal with requirements to the table: How do you deal with querying semantics and implementation when your data is not finite, what kind of processing can you do on such data, and how do you combine it with data from other sources or feed it to your machine learning pipelines, and do this at production scale?
The machine learning feedback loop
The pace of change is catalyzed and accelerated at large by data itself, in a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts: data-driven product -> more data -> better insights -> more profit -> more investment -> better product -> more data. So while some are still struggling to deal with basic issues related to data collection and storage, governance, security, organizational culture, and skillset, others are more concerned with the higher end of the big data hierarchy of needs.
Moving up the analytics stack
As descriptive and diagnostic analytics are getting commoditized, we are moving up the stack towards predictive and prescriptive analytics. Predictive analytics is about being able to forecast what's coming next based on what's happened so far, while prescriptive analytics is about taking the right course of action to make a desirable outcome happen.
Photos: How FC Barcelona uses football player data to win games
FC Barcelona is focusing on data analysis to give it an edge on the soccer field and at the bank.
A graph is a graph is graph? RDF vs LPG
Not all graphs are created similar. Here are the main differences between RDF and LPG.
Photos: Zuckerberg offers glimpse inside Facebook's cavernous Arctic datacenter
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shared a series of pictures from the social network's datacenter site up near the Arctic Circle in Sweden.
Super Bowl 50: Big tech bringing top talent to keep fans entertained, connected
Estimates peg more than one million people will visit Super Bowl City alone in the two weeks leading up to Super Bowl Sunday. No word yet on how many Instagrams of burritos and palm trees that could produce.
Presenting the 20 dumbest Ashley Madison passwords, in no particular order
Ashley Madison users have many priorities. Apparently, an airtight password is not one of them.
How to dominate at any tech job using spelling bee tips
Letter rip: Lessons any high-tech office warrior can learn from the teenage word masters of the National Spelling Bee
AT&T hauling cows, cheese wheels and a giant eyeball to Outside Lands
The annual Outside Lands music and food extravaganza marks the first occasion where AT&T is deploying all three of the biggest wireless tools in its arsenal at a single festival.
Inside CERN's datacenter helping the Large Hadron Collider probe the Big Bang: Photos
As well as acting as the hub for a grid of scientific institutions around the world, CERN's datacenter has to cope with vast amounts of raw data from its particle physics experiments.
IBM's Chef Watson mixing big data with Bon Appétit foodie favorites
There's no better way to put Chef Watson to the test than actually putting on an apron, heading down to the kitchen and taste whatever big data actually has to offer.
AT&T's EchoBOT and rewiring the baseball fan experience
AT&T offers a peek behind the scenes at the digital networking pipelines designed to improve baseball fan experiences at its eponymous ballpark in San Francisco.
Five things you need to know about GDPR
Video: What new data rules mean for you and your business.
Can machine learning bail enterprises out of their data management woes?
Technology vendors are scrambling to create an abstraction layer that can clean up data and make it easier to prep for analytics. The problem is humans haven't been the best stewards of organized data. As a result, machine learning is the next magic bullet for data management issues dating back decades.
What's new in the graph database world? Here's a quick recap
New players, new features, platforms, and ticking boxes. Graph databases, and Neo4j, are moving on.
Lured by savings and disaster back up, IT managers warm to cloud
As cloud approaches its second decade in enterprises, IT managers find it to be an ideal backup environment, two new surveys confirm.
Moving to the cloud? There's more than Amazon, Microsoft, and Google
Here are three lesser-known cloud services that can help solve the kind of business problems that keep you up at night.
MapR's latest initiative aims to put some order in the Big Data world
Data governance is finally getting industry attention, via new feature sets, open source projects, commercial products, and even whole companies. So far, though, the solutions are pretty piecemeal. MapR is trying to be more comprehensive.
Why is the chief data officer a crucial role?
We get answers from Addison Lee CDO Graeme McDermott.
The cloud: What is it and how does it work?
Cloud and 'as a service' models have changed the way computing works. Get over it.
Could data vanish forever? Scientists work on data preservation strategies
Can data from organizations as prominent as NASA vanish into thin air? A grass-roots initiative lead by scientists and researchers believes it just might, and is doing everything in its power to prevent this.
Finland relies on open data to smarten up the power grid
Offering open-use terms, near real-time access, and APIs, Finland's electricity grid operator says it's the first European country to open up national electricity data.
Microsoft is building a 'world graph' for geographic data
Microsoft, HERE, TomTom, and Esri are collaborating on building a world graph of geographic data that's integrated with Microsoft's Azure cloud. Mary Jo Foley
The world's digital history is stored in this old church
The Internet Archive has been collecting websites, books, music, software and other materials for the last 20 years. This is what it's like to be inside their real-life location.
M2M makes sense for DBS Bank
[CASE STUDY] Singapore bank is expanding its machine-to-machine infrastructure to capture customer interactions on mobile devices and social media in real-time, which it hopes will improve service quality and customer experience.
HP: Printing just ain't what it used to be
ZDNet Senior Editor Sam Diaz shares his views on the recent news that Hewlett-Packard's printing and imaging reported a 20 percent decline in the third quarter of 2009. He says companies such as Facebook are cutting into HP's printer business with online photo-sharing tools.
FileMaker 14, First Take: Going mobile
The venerable FileMaker database gets an update that includes better development tools, including the ability to create mobile versions of databases that run in the browser.
PDF-eXPLODE
For standard invoices and reports requiring efficient delivery, PDF-eXPLODE could well be a lifesaver. It can be a bit touchy on occasion, but once your document templates are set up properly it should be plain sailing.
InterSystems launches CACHÉ 2007
InterSystems launches CACHÉ 2007, the latest update to their post-relational database product.
IBM DB2 9
IBM's DB2 database adds several powerful new tools in version 9 including native XML support and DB2 Developer Workbench, and offers serious competition to Oracle and Microsoft.
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