Data is the information that drives business. It can be structured in rows and columns, like a customer name, address, and phone; and it can be unstructured, such as an email or a social media post. Structured data is what is populated in Relational Database Management Systems such as those created by Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, and open-source PostgreSQL and MySQL, among others. That data can be accessed using the standard Structured Query Language (SQL). Unstructured data resides in what are called NoSQL databases, such as Cassandra, Couchbase, MongoDB and many, many others. Many organizations today run both kinds of databases.
Once the data is stored, it must be easily retrievable, found amid the mountains of data organizations collect, and made available at scale. Numerous tools exist for those jobs, including Hadoop, Apache Spark and many more. It is through the collection and analysis of data that businesses can make decisions that affect their bottom line.
Box announced the launch of Box Extract, which intelligently pulls information from content and saves it as metadata, helping organizations automate workflows and accelerate decision-making by making information more easily accessible. According to the company, a lot of organizational knowledge lives in contracts, product specifications, policy documents, charts, and other types of unstructured content. Box … continue reading
As this year comes to a close, many experts have begun to look ahead to next year. Here are several predictions for how companies will manage their data in 2026. Sijie Guo, CEO of StreamNative A fundamental shift is happening in how we think about data engineering. For decades, data engineers prepared data for human … continue reading
Despite companies wanting to implement AI and reap the benefits of it, a majority don’t have the underlying foundations in place to make it work well. According to CData’s latest report, The State of AI Data Connectivity: 2026 Outlook, there is a clear link between data infrastructure maturity and AI maturity. The report found that … continue reading
CIOs and CTOs have heard the same refrain for years on end: before you can deploy AI, you need to clean and unify your data. That belief made sense in the era of legacy machine learning, when reductive models required meticulous preprocessing and endless consulting hours. Vendors and integrators built entire business models on that … continue reading
In an increasingly interconnected business world, being able to connect business intelligence (BI) tools to internal applications or data sources is a must. Fortunately, much of the industry has standardized around REST APIs, which provides a starting point for making these connections, but it’s not a perfect system as it stands today. Progress Principal Sales … continue reading
Elastic has introduced a new disk-friendly vector search algorithm, called DiskBBQ, to Elasticsearch. According to the company, this new algorithm is more efficient than traditional search techniques in vector databases, like Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSW), which is currently the most commonly used technique. With HNSW, all vectors are required to reside in memory, which … continue reading
Harness is on a mission to make it easier for developers to do database migrations with its new AI-Powered Database Migration Authoring feature. This new capability allows users to describe schema changes in natural language to receive a production-ready migration. For example, a developer could ask “Create a table named animals with columns for genus_species … continue reading
Sonar, a company that specializes in code quality, today announced a new solution that will improve how LLMs are trained for coding purposes. According to the company, LLMs that are used to help with software development are often trained on publicly available, open source code containing security issues and bugs, which become amplified throughout the … continue reading
Companies today want to leverage their data to support business intelligence (BI) initiatives, but without the proper data connectivity processes and tools in place, that data could remain locked in silos. Enter the Progress DataDirect Hybrid Data Pipeline (HDP) connectivity solution, which allows companies to securely connect cloud and on-premises data to BI tools. The HDP … continue reading
Redgate Software has announced the launch of its new data modeling tool that helps organizations deal with the complexity of working with multiple database platforms. Redgate Data Modeler is a rebranded version of the Vertabelo Data Modeler, following Redgate’s acquisition of the company. According to Redgate, the tool had already been used by thousands of … continue reading
Getting accurate address data for customers is a challenge on its own, but getting accurate legislative district data add an entirely new level of difficulty on top. There are a number of reasons why developers might need access to that data however, such as advocacy groups trying to do outreach that involves connecting voters to … continue reading
PostgreSQL 18 has been released, with several new features like asynchronous I/O, better post-upgrade performance, and improved text processing. Asynchronous I/O allows PostgreSQL to issue multiple I/O requests at the same time rather than waiting for one to finish before starting the next. According to the PostgreSQL team, this improves overall throughput, and has resulted … continue reading
