Where AI has made real progress

We’ve been overselling current capabilities of AI for years, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a bright future. That’s perhaps why Stanford University researchers conceived of a “One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence” (100 years!) back in 2016, with plans to update the report every five years through 2116, charting the progress of…

Humans need AI — and vice versa

We’ve been overselling current capabilities of AI for years, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a bright future. That’s perhaps why Stanford University researchers conceived of a “One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence” (100 years!) back in 2016, with plans to update the report every five years through 2116, charting the progress of…

The way we AI now

We’ve been overselling current capabilities of AI for years, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a bright future. That’s perhaps why Stanford University researchers conceived of a “One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence” (100 years!) back in 2016, with plans to update the report every five years through 2116, charting the progress of…

Working with Azure Managed Instance for Cassandra

Building cloud-native applications at scale requires choosing your stack carefully. One popular tool is Apache’s Cassandra project, a NoSQL database designed to scale rapidly without affecting application performance. It’s an ideal platform for working with big data, with built-in map-reduce tools based on Hadoop, as well as its own query language. Originally developed at Facebook,…

How to use R with BigQuery

Do you want to analyze data that resides in Google BigQuery as part of an R workflow? Thanks to the bigrquery R package, it’s a pretty seamless experience — once you know a couple of small tweaks needed to run dplyr functions on such data. First, though, you’ll need a Google Cloud account. Note that…

How the cloud and big compute are remaking HPC

Roughly 25 years ago, a few open source technologies combined to make a robust, commercial Internet that was finally ready to do business and take your money. Dubbed the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python), this open source combination became the standard development stack for a generation of developers. Don’t look now,…

Why developers use Confluent to manage Apache Kafka

Imagine you are getting groceries delivered, or looking for a recommendation on what to watch next on TV, or using a credit card without worrying too much about fraud. The applications that power these interactions all rely on data in motion, and there’s a decent chance Apache Kafka powers the applications. More than 80% of…

Google’s Logica language addresses SQL’s flaws

Google has unveiled the open source Logica programming language, a logic programming language designed to “solve problems of SQL” by using syntax of mathematical propositional logic rather than natural language. Introduced on April 12 as a successor to Google’s Yedalog language, Logica is a Datalogic-like logic language. Meant for engineers, data scientists, and other specialists,…

Ahana Cloud for Presto review: Fast SQL queries against data lakes

Hope springs eternal in the database business. While we’re still hearing about data warehouses (fast analysis databases, typically featuring in-memory columnar storage) and tools that improve the ETL step (extract, transform, and load), we’re also hearing about improvements in data lakes (which store data in its native format) and data federation (on-demand data integration of…

Solving query optimization in Presto

“SQL on everything” is the tagline associated with Presto, the query engine that was initially developed by Facebook to rapidly analyze massive amounts of data — particularly data that lay scattered across multiple formats and sources. Since its release as an open source project in 2013, Presto has been adopted broadly across hundreds of enterprises.…