Snowflake wrestles Python, chases China, and ingests unstructured data

The annual Stackoverflow survey is here and while JavaScript continues to rule the roost, TypeScript has edged past Java to make it into the top five most commonly used programming languages.

Microsoft's superset of JavaScript has been slowly creeping up the rankings: it was seventh most used in 2021, up from ninth place in 2020, and languished in 12th in 2018. In the latest study it was fifth.

Interestingly, despite TypeScript's popularity in the usage stakes, affection for the technology dropped. Rust continued its run as the most loved language (87 percent of developers wanted to continue using it) but TypeScript slipped from third to fourth in the fondness stakes as Elixir leapt into second place from fourth in 2021.

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.

Cloud data warehouse specialist Snowflake is broadening its toolset to allow devs to build applications inside its platform, while providing a new row-based storage engine to support analytics on transactional data.

Launched at its annual conference this week, the features are part of a plan to encourage users – and investors – to no longer see it as a mere cloud data warehouse and to view it more as a platform for sharing data and data-analytics applications.

Snowflake is supporting new transactional workloads in something it calls Unistore, which is based on Hybrid Tables supported by a new row-based storage engine to better handle transactional data.

Updated The Python Package Index (PyPI), a repository for Python software libraries, has advised Python developers that the ctx package has been compromised.

Any installation of the software in the past ten days should be investigated to determine whether sensitive account identifiers stored in environment variables, such as cloud access keys, have been stolen.

The PyPI administrators estimate that about 27,000 malicious copies of ctx were downloaded from the registry since the rogue versions of ctx first appeared, starting around 19:18 UTC on May 14, 2022.

IPO darling Snowflake's share price took a beating in an already bearish market for tech stocks after filing weaker than expected financial guidance amid a slowdown in orders from some of its largest customers.

For its first quarter of fiscal 2023, ended April 30, Snowflake's revenue grew 85 percent year-on-year to $422.4 million. The company made an operating loss of $188.8 million, albeit down from $205.6 million a year ago.

Although surpassing revenue expectations, the cloud-based data warehousing business saw its valuation tumble 16 percent in extended trading on Wednesday. Its stock price dived from $133 apiece to $117 in after-hours trading, and today is cruising back at $127. That stumble arrived amid a general tech stock sell-off some observers said was overdue.

The next version of the standard Python interpreter, CPython, is expected in October. It will include significant performance improvements and support for running inside the browser.

Last week, the first Python language summit since 2019 took place in Salt Lake City. At the event, the language's development team announced various changes for the forthcoming version of the language, as well as its near future. The Reg has covered some future improvements before, and as they get closer, details are becoming clear, as well as what's coming in Python 3.12.

There are multiple editions of Python out there, including interpreters for the JVM and .NET CLR, as well as compilers, but the core implementation of the language is the CPython interpreter. This has some well-known limitations, including the Global Interpreter Lock or GIL, which prevents the language from taking full advantage of multicore processors.

Analytics industry veteran SAS has announced support for Python in its proprietary analytics studio.

Founded in 1976, SAS developed its own language which derived from a North Carolina State University project and is deployed across its range of analytics and machine learning environments.

Bryan Harris, CTO and executive vice president at SAS, told us he wanted to offer users an alternative.

Data warehousing specialist Teradata is taking a $60 million hit by ending sales, operations and support in Russia following the country's invasion of Ukraine.

CFO Claire Bramley told investors that of the $60 million, around $10 million was removed from first quarter revenue, leaving a $50 million impact expected across the remaining three quarters of 2022.

Teradata CEO Steve McMillan said: "In the quarter, we stopped conducting business in Russia, ceased customer interactions and services with all Russian accounts, and confirmed that we do not have any suppliers critical to our supply chain from Russia or Ukraine. Our actions were managed with a priority of support and care for our employees who were directly affected.

Graph database specialist Neo4j has launched a graph analytics workspace as a fully managed cloud service.

Called AuraDS, it is aimed directly at data scientists hoping to use the features of Neo4j's graph database and its machine learning library, promising to liberate data scientists from the dreary tasks of setting up databases and broadening the appeal of the graph databases, according to Carl Olofson, IDC research vice president.

Neo4j launched a native graph analytics workspace, graph database, scalable graph algorithms, machine learning libraries and graph visualization all in one environment in April 2020.

The folks at Deep Instinct say they have studied a Go-written variant of the malware used by the Arid Viper cyber-crime ring.

Deep Instinct, founded in 2015, says it uses deep learning to detect and block malware. While training a deep-learning model that's focused on identifying software nasties written in Go, the researchers uncovered an executable file built using the programming language, submitted it to the VirusTotal website, and found only six security vendors had the binary flagged as malicious.

Further investigation uncovered two similar Go-written binaries. From these programs, we're told, it became clear the team were looking at a variant of Micropsia. This malware was identified in 2017 and is used exclusively by Arid Viper, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group believed to be based in Gaza and known as APT-C-23. Deep Instinct named the Go-written malware Arid Gopher.