Tech 10: Turning Big Data Into A Big Win

These 10 new database, data management and business analytics tools help businesses leverage data for competitive advantage.

Digital Data Deluge

A total of 64.2 zettabytes of business and consumer data was created or replicated globally in 2020, according to market researcher IDC. With data volumes growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 23 percent, that number is expected to reach 180 zettabytes by 2025, IDC said.

Businesses and organizations today need to manage and analyze data to maximize operational performance and gain competitive advantage. And there is no shortage of “big data” software systems and tools to help them including databases, business analytics software, and data integration and transformation tools.

Here’s a look at 10 recently introduced new and enhanced big data products that are designed to help businesses get a handle on—and get the most out of— their ever-expanding data assets.

Fivetran Business Critical

Fivetran, a developer of automated data integration software used to build and manage high-volume data pipelines, has added a new tier of functionality to its platform that provides a high level of protection for sensitive data.

Fivetran Business Critical is a set of new security-related features that enable businesses and organizations to create a more secure data stack that meets internal and regulatory requirements, including regional data regulations such as GDPR and CCPA and industry compliance measures such as HIPAA and PCI.

Fivetran also just completed its acquisition of HVR and will add that company’s real-time cloud data replication technology to its product portfolio.

Hitachi Vantara Lumada DataOps Suite

Hitachi Vantara unveiled the v1.1 edition of the company’s Lumada DataOps Suite, a portfolio of data management and analytics software. New capabilities address data sprawl and dark data challenges and help customers in vertical industries such as retail, manufacturing, banking and health care more easily collect, access and analyze data from any cloud, edge or on-premises environment.

Included in the suite is Pentaho v9.2 with support for Microsoft Azure, and Lumada Data Catalog v6.1 with “fingerprinting” tagging technology from the 2020 acquisition of Waterline Data.

Informatica Cloud Data Governance & Catalog

Many businesses and organizations lack the data quality assurance and governance capabilities they need to realize the full potential of their data. Informatica’s new data governance and catalog as a service is designed to help businesses modernize their data and analytics governance programs.

The new offering, part of the company’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud, combines data cataloging, data quality, and data and AI governance capabilities with a unified, cloud-native, metadata-driven intelligence.

Kyligence Cloud 4.5

Kyligence Cloud is a cloud-native edition of the company’s AI-enhanced, self-tuning analytics platform (based on the Apache Kylin distributed analytics engine) that can work with petabytes of data.

This latest release offers smart-tiered storage for enhanced ad-hoc query exploration, support for the Clickhouse open-source OLAP database, real-time capabilities for improved data timelines from streaming data sources, and an enhanced unified semantic layer to support Microsoft Power BI.

MongoDB 5.0

MongoDB recently launched MongoDB 5.0, a new release of the general-purpose document database for developing modern applications.

The 5.0 release offers several new technology features including native time series support for developing and running applications like IoT and financial analytics, multi-cloud privacy controls, “live resharding” for seamless data redistribution across a cluster, and versioned API capabilities for future-proofing applications.

MongoDB also previewed a serverless database model on MongoDB Atlas, the company’s fully managed cloud database service.

Rockset Rollups

Rockset develops the Rockset real-time indexing and analytics database. The company recently debuted a new release of the database with enterprise-grade security and compliance capabilities including SOC 2 Type 11 certification.

Rockset also introduced Rollups, a new SQL transformation capability within the database that provides a more accessible and effective way to perform real-time analytics on streaming data. Rollups uses standard SQL to continuously perform real-time data transformations and pre-aggregations as new data is ingested from sources such as Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB, cutting storage and compute costs for real-time analytics at cloud scale.

Starburst Enterprise, Galaxy And Stargate

Starburst Enterprise is a commercial edition of the open-source Trino distributed SQL query engine.

A recently introduced new release of Starburst Enterprise provides improved performance, additional security features, a new proprietary Parquet reader, enhanced support for the Delta Lake format, and the new Starburst Cached Views that expands the concept of materialized views to data mesh architectures.

Starburst Galaxy is a fully managed cloud service, based on Starburst Enterprise, that simplifies deployment and application development. Stargate, an add-on for Starburst Enterprise, enables organizations to run cross-cloud analytics on data distributed around the world.

Tableau 2021.3

The newest release of Tableau’s analytics platform offers new data preparation, management and governance capabilities including centralized row-level security that allows administrators to configure which groups and individual users have access to slices of data.

The release also boosts the software’s availability and scalability to handle large-scale analytics with the new Enterprise Deployment Guidelines reference architecture and new dynamic scaling and resource management features. A new enterprise subscription plan lets customers bundle Tableau Data Management and Tableau Server Management with the core analytics platform.

TigerGraph 3.2

TigerGraph 3.2 is the latest release of the TigerGraph enterprise-grade graph database with a long list of new availability, scalability, manageability and security functions that the company said will ensure that mission-critical graph applications work in both public and private clouds.

Graph databases highlight, discover and predict complex relationships within data and are used in such applications as customer relationship management, fraud detection and supply chain management.

New capabilities in the 3.2 release include business continuity support via cross-region replication of TigerGraph clusters; advanced cloud management through built-in Kubernetes support; security and access control at scale through user-defined roles; and simplified management through cluster resizing, faster backup and restore, and direct control over resource allocation for large queries.

Yugabyte Cloud And YugabyteDB

Yugabyte Cloud is a fully managed Database as a Service for building cloud-based applications and moving legacy applications to cloud platforms. Yugabyte cloud is based on YugabyteDB, the company’s next-generation distributed SQL database that is compatible with the open-source PostgreSQL database.

YugabyteDB 2.9, the latest release of the YugabyteDB database, pushes the capabilities of relational database technology for cloud-native transactional applications. The release includes the Yugabyte Smart Driver for SQL, a JDBC client driver that boosts application performance and fault tolerance by connecting to any node in a distributed SQL database cluster without the need for an external load balancer.

YugabyteDB 2.9 also offers point-in-time recovery, distributed transactional backups and transactional savepoints, and a reduction in network bandwidth usage through RPC compression.