DataStax slurps graph database biz Titan's brains

DataStax, the database company based on the open-source Cassandra system, has secured $115 million in funding for a $1.6 billion valuation.

Led by the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs and backed by RCM Private Markets and EDB Investments, the latest round follows a strong first quarter based on the popularity of DataStax's Cassandra DBaaS Astra DB. Existing investors include Crosslink Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, OnePrime Capital, and others.

Cassandra is a distributed, wide-column store database suited to real-time use cases such as e-commerce and inventory management, personalization and recommendations, Internet of Things-related applications, and fraud detection. It is freely available on the Apache Version 2 license, although DataStax offers managed service Astra on a subscription model.

Aerospike, the value-key NoSQL database, has launched a collaboration with data connection vendor Starburst to offer SQL access to its datastores.

Dubbed Aerospike SQL Powered by Starburst, the system hopes to offer data analysts and data scientists a single point of access to federated data in Aerospike using existing SQL analytic tools such as Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI. It is the first time Aerospike has offered an off-the-shelf tool to analyze its database using SQL, the ubiquitous database language.

Aerospike was purpose-built with a highly parallelized architecture to support real-time, data-driven applications that cost-effectively scale up and out. It claims to offer predictable sub-millisecond performance up to petabyte-scale with five-nines uptime with globally distributed, strongly consistent data.

If you want to run analytics in a serverless cloud environment, Amazon Web Services reckons it can help you out all while reducing your operating costs and simplifying deployments.

As is typical for Amazon, the cloud giant previewed this EMR Serverless platform – EMR once meaning Elastic MapReduce – at its Re:Invent conference in December, and only opened the services to the public this week.

AWS is no stranger to serverless with products like Lambda. However, its EMR offering specifically targets analytics workloads, such as those using Apache Spark, Hive, and Presto.

Opinion Making a call on the quality of a new idea in tech can be hard. But if you ask me, not in the case of Lonestar Data Holdings, whose plan to build datacenters on the Moon is literal lunacy.

Every detail of the roadmap, from tentative tiny proofs of concept to massive underground server farms built and tended by Moon robots, is priceless nonsense. From Apollo onward, every spacecraft has had data storage and network access. We have retrieved data held in New Horizon's 16GB filing system from Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth, 16 thousand times more distant than the Moon. Concept bloody well proved.

As for building bit lairs in lava pipes by robot, nobody's built a datacenter by robot on Earth yet. And nobody seems minded to try.

Pyramid Analytics, the BI company which counts Siemens, VW Ireland and Dell among its customers, has secured Series E funding of $120 million.

Founded in 2009, the company has now secured venture capital totalling $200 million, with the latest round led by H.I.G. Growth Partners, with the participation of Clal Insurance Enterprises Holdings, Kingfisher Capital, and General Oriental Investments. Sequoia Capital and Viola Growth are among investors in earlier rounds.

The company sells something it calls "Decision Intelligence." It claims that applying artificial intelligence to analytics lowers the skills barrier and automates the complex steps required to make decisions with data.

Distributed NoSQL database Aerospike has added support for JSON documents to a slew of new features included in its Database 6 release.

The value-key database has established its niche by touting high throughput, low latency and global scalability. It is adding support for the document format in a bid to broaden use cases and take on document database specialists Couchbase and MongoDB.

Lenley Hensarling, chief product officer, said some customers were supporting as many as 13 billion transactions per day on Aerospike. Support for JSON document models, the Java programming models, and JSONPath query would help users store, search, and better manage complex data sets and workloads.

Companies that move and analyze huge volumes of data are always on the lookout for faster ways to do it. One Australian company says it has created a protocol that can "transmit terabytes per minute across the globe."

The company, Arcitecta, which has an almost 25-year history, has just announced the new Livewire protocol, which is part of their data management platform, Mediaflux, used by institutions including the Australian Department of Defense, drug maker Novartis, and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

According to CEO Jason Lohrey, Livewire itself has already made an impact for some of the largest data movers. "One of our customers transmits petabytes of data around the globe, he told The Register.

A data analytics company claiming to be able to process millions of rows per second, in real time, has just closed out a Series A funding round to take-in $37 million.

Tinybird raised the funds via investors Crane Ventures, Datadog CPO Amit Agarwal, and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, along with new investments from CRV and Singular Ventures.

Tinybird's Stephane Cornille, said the company plans to use the funds to expand into new regions, build connectors for additional cloud providers, create new ways for users to build their own connectors, provide tighter Git integration, Schema management and migrations, and better defaults and easier materialization.

The IBM Cloudant software team has decided to pull the plug on its push to create a new database engine underlying Apache CouchDB, the NoSQL document store used by the BBC, Apple and atomic research facility CERN.

In a post on the Apache list, Robert Newson, former IBM Cloudant employee and Apache CouchDB Project Management Committee member, explained that IBM Cloudant had supported a plan to "build a next-generation version of CouchDB using the FoundationDB database engine as its new base."

"They will not be continuing to fund the development of this version and are refocusing their efforts on CouchDB 3.x," he said.

The UK government is putting the feelers out for a bundle of big data products and services in a move that could kick off £2bn in tendering.

Cabinet Office-run Crown Commercial Service (CCS), which sets up procurement on behalf of central government ministries and other public sector organisations, has published an early market engagement to test the suppliers' interest in a framework for so-called big data and analytics systems.

According to the prior information notice: "Big data and analytics is an emerging and evolving capability, with its prominence heightened by COVID. It is fast becoming recognised as business critical and a core business function, with many government departments now including chief data officers. The National Data Strategy and implementation of its missions reinforce the requirement to access and interrogate Government data more effectively to improve public services."