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Category: data warehouse

Here is why enterprise data leaders care about the Modern Data Stack

by Ashish Kakran

A version of this blog appeared in TechCrunch: Is modern data stack just new wine in an old bottle?

Remember the cable, phone and internet combo offers that we used to receive in our mailbox? These offers from cable companies are highly optimized for conversion. The type of offer and the monthly price can vary significantly between two houses right next to each other or even between different condos in the same building. I know because I used to be a data engineer once and built Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) data pipelines for this type of offer optimization. Part of my job involved unpacking encrypted data feeds, cleaning them to remove rows or columns that had missing data and map the fields our internal data models. The clean, updated data was then used by our statistics team for modeling the best offer for each household. This was almost a decade ago. Now take this process that I described, run it on steroids for 100x larger datasets and that’s the scale that mid-sized and large organizations are dealing with today.

Take for example, a single video conferencing call can generate logs that require 100s of storage tables. Cloud has fundamentally changed the way business is done because of its unlimited storage and scalable compute resources at an affordable price. A simple comparison between the old and modern stack looks like this:

Why do data leaders today care about the modern data stack?

  • Self-service analytics: the citizen-developers want access to critical business dashboard in real-time. Their desire is (Read more...)

Databricks raises $1.6B at $38B valuation as it blasts past $600M ARR

by Alex Wilhelm

Databricks this morning confirmed earlier reports that it was raising new capital at a higher valuation. The data- and AI-focused company has secured a $1.6 billion round at a $38 billion valuation, it said. Bloomberg first reported last week that Databricks was pursuing new capital at that price.

The Series H was led by Counterpoint Global, a Morgan Stanley fund. Other new investors included Baillie Gifford, UC Investments and ClearBridge. A grip of prior investors also kicked in cash to the round.

The new funding brings Databricks’ total private funding raised to $3.5 billion. Notably, its latest raise comes just seven months after the late-stage startup raised $1 billion on a $28 billion valuation. Its new valuation represents paper value creation in excess of $1 billion per month.

The company, which makes open source and commercial products for processing structured and unstructured data in one location, views its market as a new technology category. Databricks calls the technology a data “lakehouse,” a mashup of data lake and data warehouse.

Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi believes that its new capital will help his company secure market leadership.

For context, since the 1980s, large companies have stored massive amounts of structured data in data warehouses. More recently, companies like Snowflake and Databricks have provided a similar solution for unstructured data called a data lake.

In Ghodsi’s view, combining structured and unstructured data in a single place with the ability for customers to execute data science and business-intelligence work (Read more...)