Today's Big Data Pulse
Leadership Gaps Hamper Data Engineering Teams, Survey Finds
Three 2026 surveys of 1,629 data professionals reveal organizational issues now dominate data‑engineering bottlenecks. In January, weak leadership direction and poor requirements accounted for 40% of top‑bottleneck votes, while by April 50% cited lack of clear ownership as the biggest pain point. Legacy systems and tooling were far lower priorities, at 25% and under 5% respectively.
Also developing:
By the numbers: Sensor Tower acquires AppMagic to expand SMB offering
Striim Enables a New Wave of Enterprise AI Innovation on Google Cloud with Validata Cloud, AI Agents, and MCP AgentLink
Striim unveiled a suite of new capabilities on Google Cloud, including the launch of Validata AI Cloud, expanded AI Agents, and the MCP AgentLink connector. The platform streams operational data with sub‑second latency, creating a continuously refreshed data layer for analytics, applications, and AI models. Real‑world deployments span a multinational fintech syncing Oracle to Spanner, a healthcare retailer modernizing prescription services across 9,000 stores, and a US derivatives exchange feeding AlloyDB for real‑time analytics and fraud detection. Validata AI Cloud adds fully managed, vector‑based data validation and automatic repair scripts across on‑prem and cloud targets.
Data Debt Will Cripple Your AI Strategy if Left Unaddressed
AI success hinges on clean data, yet many enterprises carry years of data debt from legacy practices, mergers, and ad‑hoc solutions. IDC warns that postponing remediation could increase AI project failure rates by 50 percent by 2027. CIOs are urged to...
LIV Golf Engages Fans with Agentic AI
LIV Golf has introduced two agentic AI tools—Fan Caddie (nicknamed “Chip”) for fans and Agent Caddie for broadcasters—to deliver real‑time stats, personalized content, and on‑site logistics. The AI agents are built on Salesforce’s Agentforce 360 platform after extensive data‑cleaning work....
Exclusive: Omni Raises $120 Million to Fix One of AI’s Biggest Enterprise Data Problems
Omni, a startup that provides a governed semantic layer for enterprise data, closed a $120 million Series C financing round led by Iconiq, lifting its valuation to $1.51 billion. The company’s technology translates raw data into consistent business metrics, serving customers such as...
NatWest Launches Venture Banking with AWS Partnership - and the Data Architecture Story Behind It
NatWest has unveiled a new Venture Banking unit aimed at high‑growth, equity‑backed firms, coinciding with a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services. The collaboration focuses on building a unified data mesh on SageMaker Studio to give the bank a single...
Dell’s Vrashank Jain on The Data Problem That Could Break Your AI
Dell’s AI Data Platform lead Vrishank Jain warns that data readiness—not model quality—is the primary obstacle to enterprise AI projects. He highlights fragmented data sources, missing metadata, and the latency caused by moving large datasets across clouds and edge environments....
Google Cloud, Collibra Deepen Ties to Power Unified Data Governance in Lakehouse Era
Google Cloud and Collibra announced an expanded partnership that adds bi‑directional metadata synchronization between Collibra and Google Cloud Knowledge Catalog. The integration, now in public preview, gives joint customers unified data discovery, semantics and compliance across open lakehouse environments, strengthening...
Matrix Chosen by Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Factory to Deploy AI Revenue Intelligence for Media
Matrix Solutions has been selected for Microsoft’s Cloud Accelerate Factory, granting the company free access to Microsoft’s architecture and development resources to build an AI‑powered revenue intelligence layer for media companies. The partnership aims to deliver a top‑down and bottom‑up...
USDA Signs $300 Million Palantir Deal to Modernize Farmer Support Services
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has entered a $300 million blanket purchase agreement with Palantir Technologies to upgrade its IT infrastructure and data analytics under the National Farm Security Action Plan. The contract will power the “One Farmer, One File” initiative,...
Les Roches' SPARK Summit Showcases AI Boosts and Data Governance for Hotels
Les Roches Crans‑Montana launched the three‑day SPARK Start‑Up Summit, where AI‑driven revenue tools reported a 15% uplift for 400 hotel clients and a case study showed review growth from 1,100 to 2,500. Industry leaders debated data governance, local luxury, and...
Lean Manufacturers: You’ve Implemented Dynamics 365 F&SCM, Now Unlock Its Full Value with a Fabric Lakehouse
Lean manufacturers using Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management can now amplify their data capabilities with Microsoft Fabric lakehouse. The lakehouse consolidates ERP transactional data with shop‑floor signals, quality metrics, and operational feeds into a single, clean data environment....
Reimagining Tech Infrastructure for (and with) Agentic AI
Enterprises must redesign IT infrastructure to support the rise of agentic AI, which automates 60‑80% of routine tasks and promises 20‑40% cost reductions. However, projected infrastructure spending could triple by 2030 while budgets stay flat, creating a dual pressure on...
Dashboard Dread to AI-Driven Decisions: How Tira Rebuilt Its Analytics Workflow
India’s leading beauty retailer Tira overhauled its analytics workflow by integrating Amplitude AI agents and the Model Context Protocol. The new stack automatically monitors KPI dashboards, sends targeted alerts, and generates AI‑driven daily summaries, reducing the analysis cycle from over...
Perceptron Network – A Thousand Eyes, One Vision for Decentralized AI Data
In this episode, Andy Pickering talks with Peter Anthony, co‑founder of Perceptron, about the company’s decentralized data infrastructure that taps idle user bandwidth to collect real‑time, geographically diverse web data for AI training. Peter explains how the "thousand eyes, one...
MAHA Institute Names Chief Data Strategist Focused On Interoperability Issues
The MAHA Institute, a policy hub backing HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Agenda," has appointed health‑technology executive Jaime Bland as its chief data strategist. Bland’s mandate centers on improving patient access to medical records and establishing...
Stop Adding Indexes: What's Actually Slowing Your SQL Server Queries When SSIS Loads Data
A non‑clustered index reduced a single query from 12 seconds to 400 ms, but the same indexes later doubled an SSIS load window from 40 to 90 minutes. Each index adds write‑time overhead on every INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE performed by...
Stable Kernel Rolls Out Bespoke CDP Services for Fortune 500 Marketers
Stable Kernel, an Atlanta‑based digital‑transformation firm, announced a new line of custom Customer Data Platform (CDP) services built specifically for Fortune 500 marketing organizations. The offering promises real‑time data unification and activation, allowing marketers to personalize experiences at enterprise scale.
Snowflake Adds AI‑Powered Coding and Workflow Tools, Targeting DevOps Automation
Snowflake rolled out major upgrades to its Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Code products, introducing a personal work agent for business users and new developer tools that integrate with AWS Glue, Databricks, VS Code and more. Over 9,100 customers now use the...
China's 'Flash' Robot Wins Half‑Marathon, Showcasing AI‑Powered Industrial Automation
China’s humanoid robot Flash crossed the finish line of the 2026 Beijing E‑Town half‑marathon in 50 minutes 26 seconds, beating the human world record. The win underscores rapid advances in AI‑driven sensor data, edge computing and analytics that are reshaping...
No Excuse for Type Errors in 2026.
I honestly don't get it. In a few weeks I - by myself - could build a canonical, relational, evolvable, trace-able, PII-cleansed, auditable data architecture merging external and internal data sources with strict permissioning and provenance, with agentic, context-aware retrieval,...
Turning SAP Data Into Agentic Insights with Qlik
Enterprises using SAP often struggle with siloed, hard‑to‑access data that hampers AI initiatives. Qlik’s new Data Products for SAP aim to turn that complexity into "agentic" intelligence by delivering pre‑configured models, automated field translations and real‑time AI querying. The solution...
ETL Tool Evaluation Checklist: 6 Things to Look for Before You Choose
Choosing the right ETL platform is critical for moving, preparing, and accessing data efficiently. A six‑point checklist—covering integration, usability, performance, transformation depth, security, and business fit—helps separate robust solutions from those that become costly bottlenecks. The guide highlights Zoho DataPrep...
Google’s Cloud Storage Gets Faster and Smarter for AI
Google Cloud unveiled a suite of AI‑focused storage upgrades at Next ’26, including the high‑throughput Cloud Storage Rapid service, an enhanced Managed Lustre offering, and new Smart Storage capabilities. Rapid Bucket promises over 15 TB/s bandwidth and sub‑millisecond latency, while Rapid...
How Norway's Welfare System Moved 400GB of Daily Logs to Managed OpenSearch without a Service Interruption
Norway’s welfare agency NAV replaced its legacy Elasticsearch logging stack with a managed OpenSearch service from Aiven, driven by a license change and a broader cloud migration. The migration used a dual‑write approach, sending logs to both systems simultaneously, which...
NASA's Roman Telescope to Stream 11 TB of Data Daily, Redefining Big‑Data Astronomy
NASA unveiled its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, slated for a September launch, promising to deliver 11 TB of data each day—more than Hubble collected in its entire mission. The petabyte‑scale surveys will force a rethink of storage, processing and analytics...
Data Readiness Determines AI ROI Success
#Ad Your AI strategy is only as strong as the data behind it. Cloudera’s latest report, The Data Readiness Index 2026, shows why data access, governance, quality and infrastructure have become critical factors in determining whether AI initiatives deliver real...
Simple Fixes Like Quantization Beat Proprietary Hype
Once again I learn that: - Everyone is aware of pgvector limitations (filters, perf when doesn't fit in memory) - Vendors use this to advocate for proprietary alternatives - Almost no one talks about the simple solutions: Quantization / halfvec, partitions, partial indexes.
The Best Data Platform Development Companies for High-Growth Teams
Companies growing fast often hit data bottlenecks that stall reporting, AI, and supply‑chain visibility. The article lists the top data platform development firms for 2026, evaluating technical depth, delivery record, and industry fit rather than size or marketing hype. Overcode,...
Google Cloud Spanner Omni: Portable, Best‑in‑Class Database Everywhere
The best database on the internet is now available ... anywhere? We just announced @googlecloud Spanner Omni, with reimagined TrueTime and Colossus components for portability. https://t.co/iHBOKF7nH2 Pull the container here: "docker pull https://t.co/g26aVGW0aX" https://t.co/zqU7Z1g3Lp
Database World Trying to Build Natural Language Query Systems Again – This Time with LLMs
Database vendors are reviving the quest for natural‑language query tools, this time leveraging large language models. AWS unveiled a Bedrock‑based text‑to‑SQL service, Snowflake introduced Cortex Analyst, and MongoDB released a LangChain‑powered query API. Benchmarks show current LLM‑driven solutions achieve roughly...
How Earnix Elevate Data Accelerates Pricing and Underwriting Decisions
Earnix introduced Elevate Data, a modern data‑management layer that centralizes and automates data preparation for insurers and banks. The platform connects to enterprise sources like Snowflake, Amazon S3, and Databricks, delivering automated profiling, transformation, and governance. By refreshing datasets in...
Code Crunch Japan 2025: Redefining the Quantitative Workflow Through Human-AI Collaboration
On October 9, 2025, seven of Japan’s top financial institutions showcased their AI‑enhanced quantitative workflows at Code Crunch Japan, using Bloomberg’s BQuant Enterprise platform. The demo highlighted three proprietary applications: a multi‑agent system that fuses internal data with Bloomberg feeds and automates...
Watershed Launches New AI Agents to Clean “Messy” Sustainability Data
Watershed, a climate‑solutions platform, unveiled AI‑driven agents that clean and structure messy sustainability data. The agents automate unit conversions, duplicate removal, missing‑value handling and can produce disclosure‑ready ESG reports with suggested decarbonization actions. Alongside the tools, Watershed launched an eight‑week...
Google Cloud Pushes Data‑Analytics and AI at Cloud Next, Backlog Hits $240B
Google Cloud announced a 48% jump in Q4 revenue to $17.7 billion and a $240 billion backlog, then used its Cloud Next event to unveil a strategy centered on data‑analytics and generative AI services. The move aims to close the market‑share gap...
Fivetran Processes 18 Trillion BigQuery Rows, Boosting Enterprise AI on Google Cloud
Fivetran announced that its customers ingested more than 18 trillion rows per month into Google BigQuery in 2025, a 30% year‑over‑year increase. The milestone reflects expanding enterprise AI workloads and positions Fivetran as a key data‑integration partner for Google Cloud.
Snowflake Boosts AI Control Plane with New Intelligence and Cortex Code Features
Snowflake announced enhancements to Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Code, positioning the platform as the control plane for the "agentic enterprise." The upgrades let business users and developers connect more data sources, enterprise apps and AI models, while preserving governance and...
AI Transforms Governance of Enterprise Unstructured Data
"Unstructured data now makes up the vast majority of enterprise information, and AI is redefining how organizations bring control, accessibility, and security to it." #DataGovernance #AI https://t.co/PYomJYHDkY
Real-Time Analytics: Oldcastle Integrates Infor with Amazon Aurora and Amazon Quick Sight
Oldcastle APG migrated its Infor Cloud ERP to AWS and built a real‑time analytics platform using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon QuickSight. By leveraging Infor Data Fabric Stream Pipelines, an NLB, RDS Proxy, and API Gateway, the company streams ERP...
Seamless Hand‑off: Stream Processing to Messaging to AI Agent
Not always, but sometimes the pieces just fit together well. I like this post that shows a clean handoff from : Real-time stream processing --> messaging engine for data transformation --> AI agent that processes the message https://t.co/wGIr7GLVtQ https://t.co/VgaydbuoUW
Treon Launches AI‑Powered Treon Make on AWS for Prescriptive Maintenance
Treon announced the launch of Treon Make, an AI‑driven prescriptive maintenance solution hosted on AWS, targeting cement, ceramics and other heavy‑industry assets. The fully managed, subscription‑based service combines high‑precision wireless sensors with self‑learning analytics to accelerate fault detection and reduce...
Litmus and InfluxDB Collaborate to Modernize the Industrial Data Stack
InfluxData and Litmus announced a strategic partnership at Hannover Messe to integrate Litmus Edge with InfluxDB 3 Enterprise, creating a unified industrial data stack. The solution bridges OT systems to modern IT, delivering real‑time, high‑resolution telemetry with edge buffering and centralized analytics....
What Effective Oversight Looks Like in an Agent-Driven World
Enterprises are confronting a governance gap as AI agents move from answering queries to autonomously initiating workflows, updating records, and making decisions at machine speed. Traditional oversight—built around human roles, approvals, and periodic audits—cannot keep pace with the real‑time, cross‑system...
Ggsql Alpha Release Brings Grammar‑of‑Graphics Visualizations Directly to SQL Workflows
Posit announced the alpha release of ggsql, a grammar‑of‑graphics library that lets users write visualizations in pure SQL. The tool integrates with Quarto, Jupyter, VS Code and other environments, promising a tighter bridge between data engineering and business‑intelligence workflows.
Ecominsights Unveils SaaS Platform to Streamline Amazon Market Research
Ecominsights announced the general availability of its Amazon product research SaaS platform, delivering structured data on millions of listings to brands, distributors, agencies and investors. The tool promises to replace fragmented, manual research with a unified intelligence suite for product...
Cortex Code Expands: One Governed Agent for Your Entire Data Stack, Everywhere You Work
Snowflake announced that its Cortex Code AI coding agent is now available as a governed Cloud Agent inside Snowsight, adding zero‑install execution, web browsing, persistent storage and background tasks. The update introduces Plan Mode and Snap & Ask, giving users a previewable...
Automating Threat Detection Using Python, Kafka, and Real-Time Log Processing
Real‑time threat detection can be hardened by treating logs as a durable Kafka stream, normalizing them into a stable schema, and evaluating detections continuously. The article outlines a streaming‑first design that captures raw telemetry, applies Elastic Common Schema or OpenTelemetry‑style...
Mastercard International Assigned Patent
Mastercard International has been assigned U.S. Patent No. 12,596,828 for a "method and system for sovereign data storage." The invention, developed by a team of Irish researchers, outlines a computer‑implemented process that authenticates write requests, determines regulatory domains, and enforces...
M42 Study Leverages 500,000 Genomes to Spot Vision‑Loss Risks in UAE
M42 announced that analysis of more than 500,000 Emirati genomes uncovered around 100 genetic drivers of inherited eye disease. The partnership with Abu Dhabi's Department of Health demonstrates how massive genomic datasets and AI can shift eye care from treatment...
Addressing the Challenges of Unstructured Data Governance for AI
Enterprises in regulated sectors are expanding data governance beyond warehouses to the massive, unstructured data that now fuels AI models. Leaders cite visibility, lineage, and dynamic access‑control as the toughest hurdles, especially for documents like contracts, health records, and design...
Miovision Launches GenAI Agent for Traffic Departments
Miovision has introduced Mateo, the industry’s first purpose‑built generative AI agent for intelligent mobility, embedded in its Miovision One platform. The agent translates complex traffic datasets into natural‑language insights, producing charts, maps and safety metrics on demand. In beta trials...