AWS brings Data and AI Together
December 2024
The shot heard round the world at AWS re:Invent 2024 was the unveiling of a rethought SageMaker. A year ago, we called for AWS to start what we termed a “new day” for consolidating and rationalizing its vast array of cloud services. And nowhere is the challenge arguably greater than with data, analytics, and AI, which are increasingly coming together, Operational analytics is blurring the line with transactions, and on the analytics side, machine learning in the form of predictive analytics is increasingly insinuating itself into the types of BI queries that business users rely on for making decisions. And then there’s generative AI for making queries conversational and bridging the gap with texts, documents, messages and other un- or semi-structured data that can add context to traditional BI queries. AWS has offered multiple channels between Redshift ML, Athena, and SageMaker for disparate audiences. SageMaker brings this all together in a manner that is transformational for AWS.
Teradata VantageCloud hits inflection point
November 2024
With Teradata’s move to the cloud hitting the five-year mark, it is now comprising over a third of the company's business. And with the move to the cloud, Teradata is seeking to broaden its sights from the Global 1000 to the Global 10,000. Long positioned and perceived as a sophisticated data warehouse designed solely for the most complex use cases, with the scale of the cloud, many “mainstream” enterprises may have Teradata-class analytic problems but not realize it. How does Teradata get its voice heard above the background noise?
Three’s Company: Dissecting Oracle’s multicloud partnerships
October 2024
For a company accustomed to building its own optimized infrastructure, Oracle has embraced multicloud with a vengeance and through a unique path: implanting its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) inside the data centers of its cloud partners. Starting five years ago with Microsoft Azure, Oracle followed up early this year with Google Cloud. That lead to the natural question of whether Oracle and AWS could overcome a longstanding fierce rivalry to come to terms. The answer came at Oracle CloudWorld this fall where AWS CEO Matt Garman made a surprise appearance on stage with Larry Ellison. Aside from Nvidia, Oracle is the only provider to literally penetrate AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud data centers. While each of the hyperscaler deals cover Oracle Exadata and Autonomous database, there are differences. How do the relationships compare, and what are their impacts for Oracle customers?
Introducing InterSystems
September 2024
InterSystems, one of the oldest vendors in the software business, has been hiding in plain sight for the past 40 years with perhaps the earliest example of a multimodel database. If you use a healthcare provider with the MyChart portal, your electronic healthcare record is coming from an InterSystems database. Forty years in, it is finally doing a reveal to the world outside healthcare with as database that has been modernized for analytics, AI, and the cloud. But as the company pledges to stay private, can it avoid the fates of counterparts like SAS and Information Builders that failed to put together succession plans until their survival was at stake.
IBM introduces its own data marketplace
July 2024
Ever since Snowflake introduced data sharing, the feature has become commonplace across data and analytics cloud services. IBM’s new approach is unique in that it supports hybrid deployment, in the cloud or on-premises. And it adds another unique twist: managing data assets as data products.
Oracle chooses Google cloud as second multi-cloud partner
July 2024
Oracle has come through on promises to extend OCI to more public cloud. Oracle has signed Google Cloud as its second major hyperscaler partner for delivering Oracle Cloud services. It follows a successful relational with Microsoft Azure, which has drawn 500 customers since its launch. The new OCI-Google Cloud partnership could open the door to bringing Google Gemini AI services to Oracle database customers.
Neo4J introduces its own gen AI twist: GraphRAG
May 2024
There’s huge potential synergy between gen AI and knowledge graphs, and Neo4J is primed to jump in. We have always believed that there is synergy between graphs and vectors as both are premised on searching relationships. By putting its own skin in the game, Neo4J is well-positioned to capitalize on its value proposition.
Google brings Gen AI to the database Part 1: the analytics story
May 2024
Google NEXT 2024 was the coming-out party for its flagship Gemini large language model (LLM). For data users, it was about harnessing Gemini to enrich analytics and spread support for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) across the bulk of the database portfolio. But we are still at the beginning of this journey, especially with evolving natural language query from black art to science.
Google brings Gen AI to the database Part 2: Putting Gemini in the driver’s seat
May 2024
While the spotlight for Gen AI has been on the user experience, it will also have profound effect under the hood, helping operate the database alongside “classic” machine learning. While some innovations, such as adding natural language front end to the management console or code generation copilots, were not surprising, there is huge opportunity for tapping gen AI to help model databases, tier storage, and discover data.
Oracle’s Autonomous Database can now be globally distributed
March 2024
The distributed, scale-out topology of the cloud has enabled databases to literally expand their footprints, with Oracle now hopping the bandwagon with the Autonomous Database. Thanks to nearly 20 years of history with RAC, Oracle is no stranger to distributed database deployments. But for the cloud, Oracle had to develop for new globalized scenarios where factors such as data sovereignty and localized read/writes demanded new approaches.
Oracle Rounding out Generative AI support
February 2024
While Oracle new OCI Generative AI service starts with a portfolio of foundation models (FMs) that initially is dwarfed by AWS and Google Cloud, it is innovating with capabilities such as making semantic query services reactive. Ultimately, Oracle's biggest differentiator will be support for Gen AI services at the data and application tiers.
Snowflake expands data governance and ML horizons
January 2024
Having long cultivated the business analyst and SQL developer that are core to data warehousing, many Snowflake customers are now venturing outside their SQL comfort zones with Snowpark; according to Snowflake, at least 35% of its customer base is now using Snowpark at least once a week. With Snowpark ML and Snowflake Cortex joining Snowpark Container Services, there are now three paths for working with ML in Snowflake.
AWS re:Invent 2023: Starting a new day for AWS?
December 2023
Is this a “New Day” for AWS. At re:Invent the announcements were, not surprisingly, dominated by Gen AI. But beneath the surface, we saw a web forming between AWS data, analytics, and AI services. Reflecting its parent company, AWS has always operated on the premise that it’s always Day 1, being obsessed with the customer and focused on innovation. We’ve been urging AWS to take a “new day” attitude that starts to make its cloud portfolio more straightforward and easier to use. Are these new connections the start of a new day at AWS?
Oracle Database@Azure redefines multi-cloud
October 2023
While the core themes from Oracle CloudWorld 2023 centered on multicloud, multimodel database, low-code/no-code AppDev, and of course, Generative AI (GenAI), the announcement that Oracle database services would now also run inside Azure stole the show. While we don’t expect that OCI regions or interconnects will go away anytime soon, the writing is on the wall. Oracle wants to move in with other hyperscalers, and the question is, who’s next?
2023 Generative AI trip report
September 2023
At the beginning of the year, virtually nobody outside the AI community had ever heard of the term Large Language Models or Generative AI. Some data and analytics had been working on generative as research project for several years, but then ChatGPT came along, and suddenly they had to accelerate their plans. We finally had a chance to collate our thoughts from the spring conference season which counted Databricks, IBM, Microsoft, MongoDB, Oracle, SAS, SAP, Snowflake, and Teradata. Was this a case of vendors getting around the shiny new thing or the start of a generational change in data, analytics, and AI? We distilled some common themes, and also spotted what’s missing.
Databricks doubles down on Generative AI
August 2023
At the beginning of the year, if you asked us what we were expecting to hear from Databricks, we would have predicted a big push to make serverless broadly available; Databricks has delivered for SQL, but not yet for Spark. Instead, “Generation AI” stole the show with acquisition of MoscaicML and a long list of ML innovations under the covers.
Snowflake ups the ante for data scientists and developers
July 2023
While Snowflake is hardly ignoring its core analytics constituency, the headlines coming out of this year’s Summit were mostly about drawing the data scientist and data engineering. Snowpark Container Services addresses the key missing link in Snowpark for reaching them.
MongoDB takes developers to new ground
July 2023
By introducing Vector Search and Real-Time Streaming to Atlas, MongoDB is taking developers into uncharted territory. However, both keep the developer experience consistent, with streaming reusing MongoDB’s existing aggregation framework while vector search utilizes its familiar query API.
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse dives into the Data Lake
May 2023
Oracle is the latest analytics provider to jump into the data lakehouse with new support for Apache Iceberg. With much of that lakehouse data sitting in Amazon S3 cloud storage, Oracle has upped the ante by putting AWS Glue on equal footing with its own data catalog.
MySQL HeatWave helps Tetris.co triple revenues
March 2023
Tetris.co, a Brazilian-based provider of AdTech SaaS solutions, hit the speed bumps that are all too typical for small but fast-growing online businesses. It addressed growing pains by migrating from its SaaS provider. Moving from Amazon Aurora and Redshift to Oracle MySQL HeatWave, Tetris.co cut its out-of-pocket costs in half, enabling it to more readily support surging demand.
DEEP DIVE: Data Lakehouse open source market landscape
February 2023
The data lakehouse promises to combine the best of both worlds: the economics of scale and flexibility of the data lake with the reliability and control of the data warehouse. Over the past year, commercial ecosystems have begun forming around open source. This report provides a detailed technology analysis of the emerging platforms and forecasts what the market landscape will look like.
Oracle gives JSON a new Duality
February 2023
Oracle has significantly upgraded the JSON support in its flagship database. Oracle Database 23c introduces a new capability, eclectically named “JSON Duality,” that puts JSON document data on equal footing with relational. JSON duality provides the best of both worlds as JSON developers can take advantage of the full functional richness of the Oracle Database.
AWS adds connective tissue for data and analytics
December 2022
It may not be time to close the patent office for data and analytics platforms, but for AWS, the main challenge is helping its customers more effectively navigate and safeguard its wide portfolio of services. Zero ETL between Aurora and Redshift is an auspicious start, but AWS should take matters further by bundling and configuring combos of frequently used services.
CockroachDB takes UDFs into the distributed world
December 2022
Distributed transaction databases are no longer ‘special cases” when it comes to core capabilities that customers expect in operational systems. But to get there, Cockroach Labs had to reinvent how common processes, such as user-defined functions, should run in a distributed world.
Google BigQuery expands its footprint
November 2022
Over the past year, Google has expanded the scope of BigQuery to include in-database machine learning, native Spark integration, unstructured data support, native integrations with third party operational databases, and extension to the data lakehouse. With this broadened scope, is BigQuery becoming Google Cloud’s de facto analytics hub?
Teradata Vantage’s journey to the Data Lakehouse
August 2022
Teradata has just announced the next step in the evolution of its VantageCloud
Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS offering) new edition tailored for data lakes. As Teradata has previously supported working with polyglot data types, analytics, and federated query to cloud storage, what difference will the new Data Lake edition make?
Oracle Database Service meets Azure customers where they live
August 2022
Oracle is now taking the Azure partnership to the next logical step, extending and transforming its DBaaS services to run integrated with Azure services, and have the look and feel of an Azure service.
Google Dataplex and the data mesh
May 2022
Few topics have captivated the data conversation over the past year than data mesh. We believe data fabrics will provide the common metadata backplane that data mesh initiatives will require. How can Google Cloud’s recently introduced Dataplex data fabric enable teams to build the data products that are essential to data meshes?
Oracle Autonomous Database adoption hits inflection point
March 2021
Three years after its debut, Oracle remains the only provider to deliver a fully self-running database. Initially gaining a foothold with greenfield, price-conscious customers, we are now seeing the first evidence of the Autonomous Database being put to the acid test with classic Exadata workloads in production.
Market Landscape: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Platforms
May 2020
In recent years, virtually every hyperscaler and IT household name has hopped aboard the hybrid cloud bandwagon. How do each of the major providers, from AWS to Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle stack up?
IBM AI & Hybrid: 2024 progress report
November 2024
Five years later, it’s tempting to view Red Hat as a reverse acquisition as it coincided with a turnaround ending over a decade of declining revenues with a path to growth, record stock price, and a best friend relationship with AWS. By providing the missing piece of IBM’s hybrid and multicloud strategy, how is that preparing the ground for IBM’s AI strategy?
Databricks turns the Lakehouse tables
July 2024
Data seized the spotlight at the 2024 Databricks’ Data + AI Summit, headlined by acquisition of Tabular and the open sourcing of Unity Catalog. With Tabular, Databricks gains a seat at the table determining Apache Iceberg’s roadmap; will that seat lead to convergence with Delta Lake or forking of the projects? The summit also marked the rollout of Mosaic AI, capitalizing on a headline acquisition from last year that filled a major gap with Databricks AIOps services.
Snowflake doubles down on core platform
July 2024
With a changing of the guard and the setting of lower expectations to Wall Street as the backdrop, the core theme from this year’s Snowflake Summit was about filling out the platform such as adding a new internal data marketplace, new capabilities for making Python a first-class citizen, and the unveiling of Polaris, a new open source project for vetting credentials for accessing data lakehouses. And snowflake has finally gotten serious about addressing its Achilles Heel: cost management.
Oracle Database 23ai puts AI in the driver’s seat
May 2024
The witching hour has come for Oracle’s next long-term database release, and not surprisingly, AI is in the spotlight. But the real differentiator is Oracle’s converged database architecture. What difference will this make for enterprises seeking to take advantage of Generative AI?
AWS adds InfluxDB to Amazon Timestream portfolio
May 2024
AWS’s new partnership with InfluxData has several key narratives. First, it’s about AWS proactively engaging with open source communities, some of which long viewed it as an adversary. Secondly, when it comes to time series databases, there is no single generic architecture that will fit all workload or use case scenarios. And finally, it is the story of an open source vendor whose community pushed back when the company itself lost its way.
SAP Datasphere Knowledge Graph makes business semantics actionable
March 2024
A year ago, SAP took a major step in connecting analytics to the non-SAP world with the Datasphere business data fabric. A year on, SAP is elevating its family jewels, adding a knowledge graph to capitalize on Datasphere’s semantic layer. By tapping the metadata that captures the process intelligence from SAP’s enterprise applications, the knowledge graph should help business users running analytics gain insights on why some seemingly unrelated event triggered a late delivery or missed revenue or profitability target.
Oracle APEX expands low code/no code
February 2024
Long Oracle’s best-kept secret, the APEX low code/no code tool has built a large footprint across the Oracle database installed base. While most tools in this category are limited to apps with relatively simple logic, recent enhancements to APEX to handle more complex process logic prompted Oracle to use it for modernizing the recently acquired Cerner application into Oracle Health.
IBM doubles down on GenAI and data governance
December 2023
IBM is rounding out the last pillar of the new watsonx AI lifecycle management portfolio that was first announced in May 2023 by addressing AI governance. Watsonx.governance extends IBM’s existing AI capabilities to the frontier of Generative AI Large Language Models (LLMs). In a seemingly unrelated development, IBM also just closed acquisition of Manta, a data lineage tool partner that IBM has been working with in the field for the past 18 months. The brass ring will be integrating both capabilities to bring model and data lineage together.
Google Cloud plays a Duet
September 2023
The expansion of Duet AI was by far the big headline from Google’s recent Next conference. Spreading from code development to the data plane, what made the biggest impression is Google’s stretch goal to make Duet AI the copilot for every Google Cloud service. But one piece was missing: Google has so far failed to capitalize on the fact that it invented the transformer model that made Generative AI possible, and until it does so, it will be viewed as a follower.
TERADATA’S PARTNER AND CLOUD PIVOT
July 2023
Teradata has rounded out its cloud portfolio with VantageCloud Lake, supporting elasticity and data lakehouse storage. Elasticity could be the key to lowering barriers for Teradata customers to experiment with new workloads and broaden adoption. But the branding for Cloud Lake needs to be simplified and made more understandable to audiences beyond Teradata’s traditional sweet spot in IT.
SAP Datasphere elevates data to first-class citizen
July 2023
SAP’s new data fabric, which combines the former SAP Data Warehouse and Data Intelligence Cloud services, marks the first time that SAP is leveling the playing field between data from the SAP and non-SAP worlds. Unlike previous SAP data and analytics offerings, SAP is aiming to place partners in a starring role.
IBM WATSONX.DATA BRINGS DATA LAKEHOUSE TO THE HYBRID CLOUD
May 2023
IBM has finally opened its own lakehouse on the shores of the new watsonx family of cloud services for AI and data builders with watsonx.data. As the latest to support Apache Iceberg, IBM is differentiating, not only with its data management tooling, but also integration with Db2 and Netezza engines, and some remote caching options. How will watsonx.data stack up to the likes of Snowflake, Databricks, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and the hyperscalers, who have already planted their stakes?
Google BigQuery transcends The Big
April 2023
Google’s latest upgrades to BigQuery may not sound sexy at first glance. On this go-round, Google is cutting BigQuery down to size to support a broader cross-section of enterprise analytic workloads.
Data Lakehouse open source market landscape
February 2023
What is the data lakehouse and why are data and analytics vendors starting to take sides? A subset of the deep dive report, this report introduces the data lakehouse, forecasts the direction of this emerging market, and what its emergence means for vendors and enterprises.
SAP Builds low-code bridge to business developers
December 2022
Engaging business or citizen developers will be critical if SAP customers are to successfully bring their SAP implementations into the era of cloud. With its low code/no code approach, SAP Build is a good start in empowering business developers to take control of app modernization. We would like SAP to take the approach one step further, however.
Oracle MySQL HeatWave embraces the data lakehouse
November 2022
While Oracle is hardly the only cloud data platform to embrace the lakehouse, its implementation is notable by making data sitting in cloud object storage a first-class citizen when it comes to performance.
Oracle takes MySQL HeatWave to AWS
September 2022
On an investor call earlier this year, Larry Ellison promised to take MySQL HeatWave multicloud. Oracle has just made good on it with release on AWS. How far should Oracle take the multicloud strategy with the rest of its SaaS portfolio?
IBM Cloud services go native on AWS
August 2022
IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have just significantly upgraded their relationship with a “strategic collaboration agreement.” As IBM already operates its own cloud; has AWS-certified consultants; and has presence in AWS marketplace, what difference will this agreement mean to IBM customers?
AlloyDB: Google forges its own new PostgreSQL blend
July 2022
With AlloyDB, Google is the latest cloud provider to take the API-compatibility route to turbocharge PostgreSQL performance and functionality. What is the gap in Google Cloud’s database portfolio that AlloyDB is filling?
Google Cloud makes Spark a first-class citizen
October 2021
Google Cloud is doubling down on Spark, expanding availability beyond Dataproc service to BigQuery, Vertex AI, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Dataplex. While we believe that Google has opened the floodgates to Spark, we only see these steps as only the beginning.
Oracle cranks up the heat in the MySQL market
March 2021
Oracle owns MySQL, but ironically has never commanded much mindshare for it. With MySQL HeatWave, Oracle has come out swinging, with a well thought-out debut taking MySQL into virgin analytics territory.
HPE’s path to hybrid cloud as-a-service
December 2021
Spun off from Hewlett-Packard in 2015, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) is in the midst of transitioning its core server and infrastructure business to a hybrid cloud as-a-service footing. How can it differentiate itself in a hybrid cloud landscape that is growing more crowded?
JSON Developers? Oracle Autonomous Database wants you
August 2020
Oracle is introducing a new variant of its autonomous database geared directly to JSON/JavaScript developers. How well will Oracle succeed in meeting JavaScript document developers where they live?