Alex Woodie

The IBM i server is a database machine at the end of the day, so it’s not surprising that the latest technology refreshes (TRs) focus heavily on enhancements to Db2 for i. From new aggregate functions for the query optimizer to new and improved SQL-based IBM i services, there’s plenty of database goodness to go around in these releases.

A recurring theme in big data over the past two decades is the poor quality of data. No matter how much ink is spilled on the topic, organizations continually seem surprised that the data they want to use for analytics or AI is not in good shape and needs attention. Ataccama has made a business out of helping organizations solve their data quality problems, and with generative AI, the solutions are getting better.

StreamNative, the commercial venture behind Apache Pulsar, today rolled out Ursa, a new data streaming engine for its hosted Pulsar environment that is API-compatible with its competitor, Apache Kafka. Ursa also supports data lakehouses via multiple open table formats, giving customers more options for analyzing big streaming data.

The large language model (LLM) revolution has transformed vector databases from obscure search tech into must-have products for AI success. But which vector database features should you look for, and which vendors are innovating? The analysts at Forrester recently dug into the field to provide answers in a new report.

(TeeStocker/Shutterstock) OpenAI and Google released major updates to their AI models this week, including OpenAI’s release of GPT-4o, which adds audio interactions to the popular LLM, and Google’s launch of Gemini 1.5 Flash and Project Astra, among other news.

Across every industry, companies continue to put increased focus on gathering data and finding innovative ways to garner actionable insights.

(Image courtesy dbt Labs) We’re in the midst of a revolution thanks to generative AI. There’s no denying that. And while dbt Labs CEO Tristan Handy was expecting the AI revolution to eventually come to the world of big data and analytics engineering, it’s occurring faster than he expected.

(AI-generated/Shutterstock) Data engineers historically have toiled away in the virtual basement, doing the dirty work of spinning raw data into something usable by data scientists and analysts. The advent of generative AI is changing the nature of the data engineer’s job, as well as the data she works with–and ETL software developer Matillion is right there in the thick of the change.

When it comes to AI-powered coding assistants, Microsoft’s Copilot has the name and the numbers. But a competitor called Codeium is growing quickly, and according to its co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan, the sky is the limit for AI assistants.

COMMON today kicks off its annual POWERUp conference, bringing the global IBM i community together in beautiful downtown Fort Worth, Texas. The world’s largest IBM i user group is also wrapping up an election for its board of directors, which features three candidates for three spots.