Notebook #2: Metaverse Data; Starburst Analytics; Data Lake as a Service

Bits and bytes on the world of booming data

John Foley Feb 12

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This new ‘Notebook’ series of blog posts is my scratch pad on things that I’m working on and that caught my attention. So here goes:

• First, a personal note. My 20-something grad student son just moved to Silicon Valley to get into blockchain development, which has me thinking about data architecture in the crypto-fueled metaverse. I have no doubt it’s going to be very different, but it’s an emerging area and can be hard to get answers. I asked two tech companies about data management in the metaverse and neither were prepared to discuss it. Metaverse data architecture seems like a green field at this point. If you are interested in the metaverse, Acceleration Economy just launched a new channel, My Metaverse Minute, with lots of analysis.

• Two analytics startups have announced product development and funding to wrangle decentralized data—Starburst raised $250M Series D and Promethium $26M Series A. I’ve been giving a lot of attention recently to data distribution, and this is the front-end analytics component to that major trend. I plan to follow up these announcements in the next few days.

• Two articles on big data caught my attention. The first in IEEE Spectrum is headlined “Unbiggen AI,” and quotes Andrew Ng, CEO of Landing AI: “In many industries where giant data sets simply don’t exist, I think the focus has to shift from big data to good data.” It’s a thought-provoking conversation on the data requirements for AI, ML, and NLP.

• Also, The Register published a piece on startup Onehouse, which secured seed funding to develop data lakes as a service. The underlying tech is Apache Hudi, an open source framework originally developed at Uber. “The problem that we are trying to solve is to bring in a new model managed data lakes,” says Vinoth Chandar, CEO of Onehouse. If you aren’t up to speed on Hudi, here’s the Apache project page.

• One final thought…have you heard my argument that data volumes have grown by 1 million times over the past 25 years? I will lay out my premise in detail one of these days, but for now, I offer this little video clip of my guest appearance on Cloud Wars Live, titled “Get Ready for 1 Million Times More Data!”

That’s all for now. Please note that these ‘Notebook’ blog posts will become part of the Cloud Database Report’s paid subscription model. So if you are interested in getting these insider updates regularly, please consider a paid subscription.

Thanks and have a wonderful weekend.