IBM Cloudant pulls plan to fund new foundational layer for CouchDB

Less than a week after IBM was ordered in an age discrimination lawsuit to produce internal emails in which its former CEO and former SVP of human resources discuss reducing the number of older workers, the IT giant chose to settle the case for an undisclosed sum rather than proceed to trial next month.

The order, issued on June 9, in Schenfeld v. IBM, describes Exhibit 10, which "contains emails that discuss the effort taken by IBM to increase the number of 'millennial' employees."

Plaintiff Eugene Schenfeld, who worked as an IBM research scientist when current CEO Arvind Krishna ran IBM's research group, sued IBM for age discrimination in November, 2018. His claim is one of many that followed a March 2018 report by ProPublica and Mother Jones about a concerted effort to de-age IBM and a 2020 finding by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that IBM executives had directed managers to get rid of older workers to make room for younger ones.

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.

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.

Updated In one of the many ongoing age discrimination lawsuits against IBM, Big Blue has been ordered to produce internal emails in which former CEO Ginny Rometty and former SVP of Human Resources Diane Gherson discuss efforts to get rid of older employees.

IBM as recently as February denied any "systemic age discrimination" ever occurred at the mainframe giant, despite the August 31, 2020 finding by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that "top-down messaging from IBM’s highest ranks directing managers to engage in an aggressive approach to significantly reduce the headcount of older workers to make room for Early Professional Hires."

The court's description of these emails between executives further contradicts IBM's assertions and supports claims of age discrimination raised by a 2018 report from ProPublica and Mother Jones, by other sources prior to that, and by numerous lawsuits.

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.

IBM has quietly announced its first-ever cloudy mainframes will go live on June 30.

Big Blue in February disclosed its plans to provide cloud-hosted virtual machines running the z/OS that powers its mainframes. These would be first offered in a closed "experimental" beta under the IBM Wazi as-a-service brand. That announcement promised "on-demand access to z/OS, available as needed for development and test" with general availability expected "in 2H 2022."

The IT giant has now slipped out an advisory that reveals a “planned availability date” of June 30.

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.

HCL has given users of versions 9.x and 10.x of its Domino groupware platform two years warning that they'll have to upgrade or live without support.

Domino started life as Lotus Notes before IBM bought the company and milked the groupware platform for decades then offloaded it to India's HCL in 2018. HCL has since released two major upgrades: 2020's version 11 and 2021's version 12.

Now it looks like HCL wants to maximize the ROI on those efforts – a suggestion The Register makes as the company today emailed Domino users warning them that versions 9.x and 10.x won't be sold as of December 1, 2022, and won't receive any support as of June 1, 2024.

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.

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.