Grazed from CIO. Author: Mary Branscombe.

Given the strength of SQL Server in business, you might be surprised to learn that Microsoft has spent the last five years building a distributed NoSQL database – until you remember that services like Power BI, Bing and the Office Web apps face the same challenges as services like Netflix. They’re problems more and more enterprises have to deal with too: the deluge of data, the demands of mobility and the need for low latency even though you’re relying on cloud services.

That’s why Microsoft’s Dharma Shukla, who previously built key technologies like Windows Workflow Foundation (and worked on both Live Mesh and the never-shipped Courier tablet), has been developing Microsoft’s global-scale distributed database since the end of 2010. DocumentDB, which launched in April 2015, emphasizes the fact that NoSQL really stands for “not only SQL,” because the aim is to give you the best of both worlds...

Grazed from CryptoCoinsNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

The grid refers to a group of heterogeneous machines in offices and homes that different economic actors manage. The cloud refers to the homogenous servers in data centers that single entities like Google or Amazon manage. Since the launch of Amazon Web Services, the cloud has been the better-known of the two paradigms (cloud and grid) and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

What Hinders The Grid?

The grid concept has existed for decades, but it has not been adopted widely. The two best large-scale grid computing applications are SETI@Home and Folding@Home. These are academic projects that essentially “pay” status to a distributed network of volunteer computers by displaying a leaderboard of the top compute time contributors...

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Jessica Davis.

SAP rolled out a series of partnerships and advancements at its Sapphire Now event. Google unveiled a host of initiatives at Google I/0. HP Enterprise introduced an Internet of Things (IoT) platform. AtScale, a BI for Hadoop platform provider, raised a new round of funding. We've got it covered in our Big Data Roundup for the week ended May 22, 2016.

Let's jump in with SAP. Expanded partnerships with big cloud providers Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) were among the announcements at Sapphire Now in Orlando, Fla. SAP said it will deliver broader support for SAP HANA on Microsoft Azure to enable big data apps to run while still being protected by enterprise-level security and compliance...

Grazed from CIO-Today. Author: Jef Cozza.

The latest release of the SAP HANA platform announced yesterday at the Sapphire Now conference in Orlando, Fla., promises to bring enterprise customers some major new cloud capabilities. The SPS 12 update features a hybrid cloud approach to popular database management systems that SAP said will bring cloud capabilities to on-premises deployments.

“Our new beta program breaks down the traditional silos of on-premise and cloud, allowing customers to freely use both approaches for greater agility,” said Daniel Schneiss, senior vice president and global head, SAP HANA Platform and Databases, SAP. The true hybrid model lets organizations test the impact of IT system change requirements in the cloud before they commit the upgrades to an on-premise environment -- ultimately promoting cost-effective IT management, Schneiss said. "We designed the program in close collaboration with our customers to shape the next wave of data management services in the cloud," he added...

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio-today.com/article/index.php?story_id=103001PHW79E

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Steve Lohr.

IBM delivered a quarterly performance that shows the steady headway it is making in new businesses led by cloud computing and data-analysis software, like its Watson artificial intelligence technology. But the company’s transformation remains very much a work in progress. The erosion of some of its hardware and software products continues to be a drag on growth and profits, overshadowing the gains in the new fields.

IBM on Monday reported a 21 percent decline in net profit from continuing operations, to $2.3 billion in the first quarter that ended March 31. Its operating earnings per share fell 19 percent, to $2.35 a share, though that was above the average estimate of Wall Street analysts of $2.09 a share, as complied by Thomson Reuters...

Grazed from BlueData

BlueData, provider of the leading infrastructure software platform for Big Data, today announced the spring release for the BlueData EPIC software platform. With this new product release, available immediately, BlueData introduces several new enhancements to provide enterprise-class security and quality of service (QoS) for multi-tenant Big Data deployments. In addition, BlueData continues to add support for new applications and frameworks to provide a simple, flexible, and extensible Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) environment on-premises.

Complexity remains a major barrier to adoption for Big Data technologies like Hadoop and Spark. BlueData's software innovations make it easy to deploy Big Data infrastructure and applications, leveraging Docker containers to provide a self-service BDaaS experience on-premises together with the highest levels of security and performance for Big Data analytics in the enterprise.

Grazed from Gadgets360. Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon.com's cloud business, Amazon Web Services, said that more than 1,000 databases have been moved to the AWS cloud by customers since the beginning of the year. The AWS Data Migration Service, which allows migration of databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL from on-premises data centres to AWS, is now available to all customers, the company said on Tuesday.

Amazon Web Services said that Expedia, Pegasystems, and Thomas Publishing are among many of the customers who have moved on-premises databases to Amazon Aurora and other Amazon RDS engines. Cloud computing is the fastest growing business for Amazon, which until recently was mostly known as an online marketplace...

Read more from the source @ http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/amazon-web-services-says-over-1000-databases-moved-to-cloud-since-january-1-814460

Grazed from Talend

Talend, a global leader in big data integration software, today released a new version of its Talend Integration Cloud , a secure, Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) solution designed to help companies more easily manage on-premises, cloud and hybrid integration workloads in their AWS environments. Available now, the new release allows IT organizations to execute big data and data integration projects running on AWS Redshift or AWS Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) with fewer resources and at a reduced cost. The updated Talend Integration Cloud solution also enables developers and architects to bring native Spark processing capabilities into an iPaaS solution in order to empower departments across the enterprise with real-time analytics.

The continued growth of big data, the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT), and expanding corporate data lakes is driving companies to move an increasing percentage of data processing to the cloud. In fact, Gartner expects that enterprise iPaaS will continue to grow at a double-digit rate over the next five years. Talend Integration Cloud delivers the fast, scalable, elastic, and secure technology businesses need to keep pace with their growing stores of data and transform that information into real-time insight.

Grazed from Altiscale, Inc.

Altiscale, Inc., the leading provider of Big Data-as-a-Service, today introduced a new solution, the Altiscale Insight Cloud, a self-service analytics solution for Big Data. The Altiscale Insight Cloud supplies the critical missing bridge between Big Data and the business user -- a rapidly queried data lake that enables business analysts to get critical answers all by themselves, while using familiar business intelligence tools like Tableau and Microsoft Excel.

The Altiscale Insight Cloud powers interactive SQL queries, dynamic visualizations, real-time dashboards, and other reporting and analytics capabilities. As a high-performance, self-service analytics solution, the Altiscale Insight Cloud replaces more complex, expensive alternatives that require heavy IT involvement, allowing Big Data to be harnessed more broadly and quickly throughout the organization and improving the speed and size of business impact. 

Grazed from theInquirer. Author: Daniel Robinson.

In an unexpected move, Microsoft has announced that it is prepping a version of SQL Server for Linux systems. The company has provided public preview releases of SQL Server 2016 since May last year, and the release candidate version was last updated at the start of this month. Microsoft will now herald the arrival of SQL Server 2016 with a Data Driven event in New York on 10 March culminating in general availability of the platform later this year.

However, Microsoft has announced that it will also bring SQL Server to Linux, starting with the core relational database capabilities currently available in the private preview release and full availability slated for the middle of 2017. Bringing SQL Server to Linux will enable Microsoft to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux, as well as on-premise and cloud, according to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president for Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise Group...