Databricks: Ugh, just look at that messy data lake environment. Squints. You know... we could sort that out with a sweet shot of SQL

Databricks, the company born out of the Apache Spark boom, has let loose a raft of updates at its San Francisco conference, including an elastic compute option for analytics.

Databricks SQL Serverless, available in preview on AWS, has been designed to improve query performance and concurrency of BI and analytics workloads on messy data lake repositories.

The move is part of the company's plan to bring data lakes and data warehouses together on one system: the proverbial “lakehouse”, the coinage du jour achieving currency among vendors and commentators alike.

Analysis Under Nevada's baking summer sunshine, Snowflake last week promised it would bring together two ways of working with data that mix about as well as oil and water.

The data warehouse vendor – well known for its stratospheric $120 billion post-IPO valuation – said it would support both analytics and transactional workloads in the same system.

Launched at the Snowflake Summit 2022 in Vegas, Unistore would be the "foundation for another wave of innovation in the Snowflake Data Cloud," said Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product. "Similar to how we redefined data lakes and data warehouses for our customers, Unistore is ushering in a renaissance of building and deploying a new generation of applications in the Data Cloud," he said.

YugabyteDB, the self-styled double-decker distributed relational database, has introduced a read-committed isolation level, allowing for more flexibility for devs and bringing it into step with its more established RDBMS rivals.

With the general availability of YugabyteDB 2.15, the company behind the PostgreSQL-compatible database, said to be inspired by Google Spanner, claims to be adding performance enhancements and dynamic workload optimization.

Speaking to The Register, CTO Karthik Ranganathan, a former Facebook technical lead, said Yugabyte was the first and only distributed SQL vendor to offer all three PostgreSQL isolation levels, making it that much easier to shift existing applications to a distributed database with advanced support for the default PostgreSQL isolation level.

DataStax, the database company built around open-source wide-column Apache Cassandra, has launched a streaming platform as a service with backwards compatibility for messaging standards JMS, MQ, and Kafka.

The fully managed messaging and event streaming service, based on open-source Apache Pulsar, is a streaming technology built for the requirements of high-scale, real-time applications.

But DataStax wanted to help customers get data from their existing messaging platforms, as well as those who migrate to Pulsar, said Chris Latimer, vice president of product management.

The UK has signed up to a US plan for sharing police-held biometric data about citizens with US border officials.

According to a member of the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), the body met "informally" with representatives of the US Department of Homeland Security this week to discuss the plans.

They come under the auspices of the Enhanced Border Security Partnership (EBSP), which is designed to increase the US Department Of Homeland Security's ability to detect threats through biometric information sharing. Israel signed up to the arrangement in March.

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.

Analysis At MongoDB's recent conference in New York, the company demonstrated its ambition in taking on workloads from other databases.

The company has made significant inroads into the database market with a developer-friendly distributed document database to help devs build modern, web-based, transactional systems.

Time series and search have become targets, with the promise of support for secondary indexes in the former, and Search Facets to help developers build search experiences more rapidly in the latter.

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.

PostgreSQL co-creator and MIT computer science professor Michael Stonebraker has listed his top requests for features to add into the popular open-source database, including a time travel function he admits was implemented badly in the 1980s.

Speaking at Postgres Vision conference, Stonebreaker said the time-travel code was fundamentally a good idea, as it allows users to query data from the database’s history, and had introduced an implementation in the 1990s.

“The problem with time travel back in 1995 was that my implementation was absolutely awful. It was slow, slow, slow, slow. Whether or not time travel was a good idea, the implementation was too slow to be interesting, so it was rightfully deleted by the powers that be in the committee that has been dealing with Postgres since 1995,” he told attendees.

Oracle is planning to build a national database of individuals' health records for the whole United States following its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health records specialist Cerner.

In a presentation, CTO and founder Larry Ellison said electronic health records for individual patients were stored by hospitals and physicians, and not replicated or shared between providers.

"We're going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases," Ellison said.