Monthly Archives: September 2023

Posted by Richy George on 11 September, 2023

Teradata is adding a generative AI assistant, dubbed ask.ai, to its VantageCloud multicloud analytics platform to help employees analyze and visualize data and metadata, map tables for joining, and generate code, among other functions.

VantageCloud Lake, which was introduced by the company in August last year, is a self-service, cloud-based platform especially suited for ad-hoc, exploratory, and departmental workloads. It combines low-cost object storage with an expanded ClearScape Analytics suite that supports in-database analytics for artificial intelligence operations.

To access and analyze data faster, enterprise users can use ask.ai to ask questions in natural language from within the VantageCloud Lake interface to get instant responses, eliminating the need for manual queries, a company spokesperson said, adding that it  can also help generate code for queries based on user input.

This capability is expected to allow even non-technical users in an enterprise to analyze data, the company said, adding that technical users, such as data scientists, will also benefit from the assistant as it can generate code in proper syntax and increase code consistency, which in turn will increase developer productivity.

Ask.ai, according to Teradata, also makes it easy to retrieve system information related to VantageCloud Lake, such as environment and compute groups.

“An administrator can log in and simply ask questions about the system (such as, “What is the state?” or “What is the current consumption?”) as if speaking to an informed colleague,” the company said in a statement. 

The assistant can help with metadata analysis as well by providing information on table design, the company said, adding that this will make it easy for users to explore data sets and schemas, helping users to understand the nuances in data attributes and existing relationships between data sets.

The assistant also includes a help function for users that provides general documentation and information on Teradata functions in a particular database, detailed descriptions for a particular function, and SQL generation for that function.

Ask.ai is currently available for select VantageCloud Lake on Azure customers, Teradata said, adding that expanded access, via private preview, to VantageCloud Lake on AWS is forthcoming and general availability for all VantageCloud Lake customers is expected in the first half of 2024.

Posted by Richy George on 6 September, 2023

InfluxDB Clustered, the self-managed, open source distributed time-series database for on-premises and private cloud deployments from InfluxData, is now generally available.

InfluxDB Clustered is expected to replace the company’s older InfluxDB Enterprise offering and is built on its next-generation time-series engine that supports SQL queries. Other versions of the database with the same engine, including InfluxDB Cloud Serverless and InfluxDB Cloud Dedicated, were released earlier.

Another version of the database, dubbed InfluxDB 3.0 Edge and aimed at delivering a time-series database for local or edge deployment, is expected to be released this year, the company said.

Compared to InfluxDB Enterprise, InfluxDB Clustered can process queries at least 100 times faster on high-cardinality data, the company said, adding that the Clustered version can also ingest data 45 times faster than the Enterprise edition.

Cardinality in a database management system can be defined as the number of unique sets of data stored in a database. The more cardinality is allowed, the more a database can scale.

The new version also offers a 90% reduction in storage costs, enabled by a low-cost object store, separation of compute and storage, and data compression, the company said.

In addition, InfluxDB Clustered offers enterprise-grade security and compliance features, including encryption of data in transit and at rest, along with other features such as single sign-on, private networking options, and attributed-based access control.

The new database version is also expected to support compliance with SOC 2 and ISO standards soon.

InfluxDB Clustered may boost InfluxData’s customer base

The release of the new database version will help InfluxData appeal to enterprise users who expect cluster support for expandability as well as high availability, as they are becoming critical requirements for any enterprise, according to IDC research vice president Carl Olofson.

In particular, databases that handle workloads with time series data have been in demand with the rise in IoT applications involving operations within oil and gas, logistics, supply chain, transportation, and healthcare, according to IDC.

InfluxDB competes with companies including Graphite, Prometheous, TimeScaleDB, QuestDB, Apache Druid and DolphinDB among others, according to database recommendation website dbengines.com  

IDC’s Olofson, however, said that InfluxDB, being a native time-series database, has advantages over other databases that are adding support for time-series data.

“Its simplicity and lack of overhead make it ideal for capturing streaming data such as sensor data, which is the most common form of data requiring time series analysis, and which more complex database management systems products tend not to be able to keep up with,” Olofson said.

InfluxDB Clustered, though, could be a tough offering for InfluxData to maintain as building proper cluster support for a database system is a complicated undertaking, he said.

“InfluxDB is open source, so the company does not have complete control over its evolution, and even if the cluster support code is not open source, it must still fit into the framework of InfluxDB and Apache Arrow, which are always in state of flux,” Olofson said.