Today's Big Data Pulse
Data‑Engineering Bottlenecks Shift From Legacy Tech to Leadership Gaps
Three 2026 surveys of 1,629 data professionals show that weak leadership direction and poor requirements now account for 40% of top‑bottleneck votes, outpacing legacy systems at 25%. By April, 50% of respondents cite lack of clear ownership as the biggest pain point, while better tooling is mentioned by under 5%.
Also developing:
By the numbers: Ampere Analysis acquires PlumResearch
Maine Legislature Passes First‑In‑Nation Temporary Ban on New Data Centers
The Maine Legislature approved LD 307, a temporary moratorium on new data centers consuming 20 MW or more of electricity until November 2027, and sent the bill to Governor Janet Mills. Proponents say the pause lets the state study power and water impacts, while opponents warn it could forfeit billions in investment and jobs.
AI Agents Lack Human-Like Skepticism Toward Bad Metadata
Coding agents take bad metadata at face value. They won’t reconcile five different naming conventions for the same entity. They won’t flag that a span is suspiciously short because it timed out silently. This is a fundamental and under appreciated asymmetry: humans...
Mews Rolls Out AI‑Driven Business Intelligence Platform to 1,000+ Hotels
Mews unveiled its native Business Intelligence product, Mews BI, embedding AI‑powered analytics directly into its hospitality operating system. The tool is now automatically available to all Mews customers, with more than 1,000 early adopters reporting double‑digit occupancy and revenue lifts.
Commvault Launches ‘Ctrl‑Z’ AI Protect to Undo Cloud AI Actions
Commvault rolled out Ctrl‑Z, an AI Protect feature that can roll back actions taken by autonomous agents across major cloud platforms. The tool aims to restore data, configurations and applications after unintended AI‑driven changes, tackling emerging governance challenges in cloud‑based...
Vertiv Acquires BMarko to Expand AI Data‑Center Build Capacity
Vertiv has bought South Carolina‑based BMarko Structures, adding a 560,000‑square‑foot custom‑fabrication facility to its North American Infrastructure Solutions business. The deal, announced without a disclosed price, aims to tighten Vertiv’s supply chain as AI‑driven data‑center demand accelerates.
Unity AI Gateway Unifies Data and Agent Governance
If you ask our customers what Databricks' biggest value is chances are that you hear 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐂𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐠. In the last three years, we provided governance for Agents, MCP Servers, Tools/Skills and Unstructured data as part of our AI Gateway. Today...
Qlik Unifies Data, Analytics, and Action for AI
Latest @Qlik tools target helping users achieve AI goals https://t.co/mzrr4bpiUZ @TechTarget @EricAvidon "The real story is not another AI assistant. It is Qlik connecting trusted data products, analytics, data engineering, and action so customers can operationalize...” - @MikeNi @constellationr
Stop Waiting for Insights. Build the System That Produces Them
Marketing leaders often centralize customer data expecting instant insights, but they end up with clean dashboards that lack actionable guidance. The article argues that insight emerges only when data is coupled with a systematic execution engine that captures response metrics...
Clean Data,
ODI CEO argues data quality, not AI models, is the competitive edge. This favors incumbents like SAP with vast enterprise data over startups. Dirty data leads to 'garbage in, garbage out.' #DataQuality #AIStrategy #EnterpriseData https://t.co/WerM0by3bS
Coordinate Convergence and Calm Complexity
HighByte partnered with Amazon Web Services to give Brazilian glassmaker Vivix Vidros Planos a scalable industrial data‑fabric built on the Intelligence Hub platform. The solution curates, normalizes and contextualizes OT data from PLCs, SQL servers and edge devices before publishing...
The End of the Informatica Era: Why Chief Data Officers Are Replacing Legacy MDM with Agentic Architecture
In November 2025 Salesforce completed an $8 billion acquisition of Informatica, prompting CDOs to reassess their MDM roadmaps. Gartner forecasts that by late 2026 roughly 65% of MDM tasks will be handled autonomously, making agentic architectures the new norm. Syncari’s cloud‑native,...
Study of 10 Million Siblings Links Birth Order to Autism, Migraines and More
Researchers analyzing health records of more than 10 million siblings discovered that firstborn children are disproportionately likely to be diagnosed with autism and allergies, whereas younger siblings show higher rates of migraine, shingles and other conditions. The findings, published this week,...
Cosmic‑Ray Data and AI Boost Mining Firms' Hunt for Critical Minerals
Rio Tinto and other mining companies are deploying cosmic‑ray imaging and AI‑driven analytics to map underground mineral deposits, a move driven by record‑high copper prices and looming supply shortfalls. The effort aims to improve subsurface intelligence for both new greenfield...
What Engineering Leaders Get Wrong About Data Stack Consolidation
IBM's $11 billion acquisition of Confluent underscores a growing trend of open‑source data tools being folded into large vendor platforms. The article warns that such consolidation creates hidden architectural debt, eroding engineering autonomy and long‑term portability. It urges leaders to evaluate...
Snowflake Storage for Apache Iceberg™ Tables: Snowflake Simple Interoperability
Snowflake announced public availability of Snowflake Storage for Apache Iceberg™ tables on AWS and Azure, letting customers host Iceberg data on Snowflake‑managed storage. The service eliminates the need for self‑managed cloud buckets, providing built‑in encryption, IAM handling, and metadata tracking....
Isle of Man Wants to Turn Datasets Into Balance-Sheet Assets
The Isle of Man has introduced a Data Asset Foundation (DAF), a statutory legal structure that lets companies register curated datasets as formal property assets. Once entered into a DAF, data can be listed on balance sheets, used as collateral,...
Quantiiv’s Virtual Executive for Restaurants; Popmenu and SpotOn Create a Unified Commerce Platform
Quantiiv has introduced ROGER, an AI‑powered virtual executive that lets restaurant managers ask business questions via email and receive actionable insights. The tool pulls data from POS, inventory, marketing, weather and macro‑economic sources, mimicking a team of analysts. Over 650...
Redpanda Connect Eliminates Silos with Salesforce Connectors, Streaming CDC for Oracle and DynamoDB
Redpanda announced the general availability of four new Redpanda Connect components—a DynamoDB change‑data‑capture (CDC) input, an Oracle CDC input, and both a processor and an output for Salesforce. The connectors run natively in any Kubernetes cluster, letting teams replace fragile...
Ningbo’s Smart‑Factory Surge Boosts Output 9.3% as Data‑Heavy Production Demands New Policies
Ningbo’s manufacturers posted a 9.3% year‑on‑year rise in value‑added output in the first two months of 2026, outpacing the national rate, as factories embed data lakes, real‑time analytics and ETL pipelines. The surge coincides with growing scrutiny of water‑heavy data...
BI Isn't Dead: Dashboards Still Power Enterprise Insights
We've heard it all. BI and dashboards are dead. But every time, only to rediscover its power and resurrection whenever we need grounded data analysis in any enterprise and startup space. https://www.rilldata.com/blog/ai-reveals-why-bi-still-matters-hint-its-not-dashboards
Atomico’s Data Engine Fuels One‑third of New Deals
What does it take to invest across Europe’s startup ecosystem? @atomico built an internal data engine, using Crunchbase data as its backbone, that powers 1 in 3 new opportunities to instantly review company funding history, & uncover deeper market intelligence. 🔗:...
Why ETL Needs a Mindset Shift
Most organizations still treat ETL as a one‑time project, assuming pipelines are set once and never need change. In reality, evolving CRM fields, new finance rules, and compliance requirements constantly break static pipelines, forcing teams back to manual fixes. The...
Production-Ready Lakehouses Needed From Day One
Mid-market companies in regulated industries are moving PHI/PII into analytics lakehouses right now. The ones doing it right build for production from day one. The ones doing it wrong build notebooks they'll have to rebuild. "We'll add governance later" is already behind.
Press Release: IntellectEU Launches Catalyst Data Intelligence to Enable ISO 20022 Structured Data Readiness
IntellectEU announced the launch of Catalyst Data Intelligence, an AI‑driven platform that converts unstructured CBPR+ address data into ISO 20022‑compliant formats. The tool is designed for banks operating in regions with fragmented postal systems, where Swift’s 2026 Standard Release will reject...
Addepar Opens Singapore Hub to Accelerate AI‑Powered Wealth Management in APAC
Addepar announced the launch of a new office in Singapore, designating the city‑state as its Asia‑Pacific hub. The move follows a 130% rise in regional clients over two years and backs the company’s $9 trillion asset platform with local R&D and...
Anthropic Withholds Claude Mythos Preview, Sparking Data Security Debate
Anthropic announced that its latest language model, Claude Mythos Preview, is too dangerous for public release and created the invite‑only Project Glasswing to test it. The move has triggered a clash between AI proponents, who see it as a responsible...
Hackers Leak 78.6 Million Rockstar Records After Anodot Supply‑Chain Breach
ShinyHunters published more than 78.6 million records it says were taken from Rockstar Games, a breach traced to an Anodot supply‑chain attack. The leaked files contain internal analytics, game‑economy metrics and support data, while Rockstar says only limited, non‑material information was...
Aviation Industry Faces Data Bottleneck Despite Record Tech Investment, New Report Finds
The aviation sector poured a record $50.8 billion into technology in 2025, yet fragmented data systems are curbing the return on that spend. Airlines and airports both earmarked billions—$36 billion and $14.8 billion respectively—toward digital tools, with data‑driven decision‑making now a top priority...
DEAL‑Elsevier Workshops Boost Data Governance Trust in Publishing
Trust in scientific publishing depends on how user data is handled. A series of workshops between DEAL and Elsevier created space for a structured, outcome-focused discussion on data use, governance, and privacy in scientific publishing. Read more: https://t.co/IbjdGuuWhs #data #governance #privacy #scientificpublishing...
The Digital Omnibus Reopens the EU Data Acquis Before It Has Even Been Tested
The European Union’s Digital Omnibus proposal folds the Data Governance Act, Open Data Directive and other recent statutes into the 2023 Data Act, turning it into the central hub for data access, reuse and governance. While marketed as simplification, critics...
Labcorp, AWS and Datavant Launch AI‑Powered Platform to Speed Alzheimer’s Research
Labcorp announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services and Datavant to roll out an AI‑driven real‑world data platform for Alzheimer’s research. The platform promises to compress data‑preparation cycles from months to minutes, leveraging Labcorp’s diagnostic data and privacy‑preserving tokenization. The...
Tata Power Chooses Databricks to Power AI‑Driven Energy Management
Tata Power, the Indian utility giant, has selected Databricks as its enterprise‑wide AI and data platform partner. The move will unify data engineering, analytics and AI across the company’s grid, renewable, and consumer‑facing businesses, accelerating real‑time insights and smarter energy...
AI Alliance Launches Project Tapestry to Build Open, Sovereign AI Platform
The AI Alliance, a nonprofit coalition of more than 200 members, announced Project Tapestry, an open-source platform for distributed training of frontier models. The initiative seeks to reconcile open AI development with sovereign data controls, offering participants the ability to...
Cloudera Launches Hybrid Data Platform with 2032 Support to Cut Costs and Speed AI
Cloudera announced a next‑generation hybrid data and AI platform that will receive support through 2032. The upgrade promises unified cloud‑on‑premise operations, reduced infrastructure spend and accelerated analytics for large enterprises.
Vibhor Kumar: AI-Ready PostgreSQL 18 Is Out: Why AI Applications Win or Lose at the Seams
Vibhor Kumar and Marc Linster released “AI‑Ready PostgreSQL 18,” a field guide showing how to store embeddings in PostgreSQL with pgvector and combine them with SQL constraints. The book demonstrates a hybrid pattern where semantic retrieval and relational truth run...
Starburst Adds AI Front End in a Bid to Make Conventional Business Intelligence Dashboards Obsolete
Starburst Data launched AI Data Assistant, a natural‑language front end that lets business users query enterprise data without building traditional dashboards. The tool, named Aida, runs on Starburst’s Trino‑based platform, accessing data in place across clouds, lakes, and warehouses while...
Qlik and ServiceNow Partner to Bring Trusted Enterprise Context Into AI-Powered Workflows
Qlik and ServiceNow announced a partnership to embed trusted enterprise context into ServiceNow workflows and AI agents. New Qlik metadata collectors for the ServiceNow Data Catalog improve data lineage, governance, and discovery. The Qlik Analytics Engine and AI will feed...
Make Your Azure Data Platform AI-Ready
Enterprises accelerating AI on Microsoft Azure are finding that the real obstacle is not model sophistication but fragmented data foundations. A unified, well‑governed data layer is essential for moving AI from experimentation to production at scale. Azure’s suite—spanning Synapse, Data...
From AI Pilots to Production Results with Governed Execution
Enterprises pour billions into AI pilots but most fail to reach production because fragmented data, siloed teams, and missing operating models block scale. The core issue is not the lack of models but the absence of a unified, governed data...
Amtrak OIG: Agency Needs Better Data Governance to Achieve State of Good Repair –– News and Commentary
The Amtrak Office of Inspector General released a report highlighting serious data‑governance gaps that impede the railroad’s State of Good Repair (SOGR) program. Amtrak estimates a $47 billion backlog of infrastructure assets that fall short of safety and performance standards, with...
Data, Not Models, Limits AI in Biology
The biggest bottleneck in AI for biology isn't models. It's data. @BerkeleyLab is building the infrastructure to fix that: integrated multi-omics datasets, queryable data lakehouses across data types, and high-quality annotated training data for modeling dynamic biological systems. This is DOE-funded, national-scale...
Fintel Alliance Starts Planning Its Next-Gen Analytics Hub
Australia’s Fintel Alliance – a coalition of banks, regulators, police and gambling operators – is redesigning its collaborative analytics hub (CAH) to handle larger, real‑time financial‑crime monitoring. The existing hub, first deployed in 2024, proved its concept by uncovering hidden...
Teradata Deploys Analyst Agent on Microsoft Marketplace to Accelerate AI‑Driven Decision‑Making
Teradata announced the availability of its enterprise‑grade Analyst Agent on Microsoft Marketplace, embedding AI‑assisted conversational analytics directly into Azure environments. The agent’s built‑in telemetry promises transparent, governable AI, a feature sales teams are touting to win over risk‑averse enterprises.
Airbnb Switches to OpenTelemetry, Handles 100M Metrics per Second
Airbnb’s observability engineering team has moved its core metrics pipeline from StatsD and a proprietary Veneur system to an OpenTelemetry‑based stack, now ingesting more than 100 million samples per second. The migration leverages the OpenTelemetry Protocol, the OpenTelemetry Collector, and VictoriaMetrics’...
It’s Not Governance Slowing Down Enterprise AI — It’s the Lack of It, Says Qlik Executive
Enterprises racing to deploy AI are hitting a wall, not from model limitations but from insufficient data governance, Qlik’s chief strategy officer James Fisher said. A Qlik‑Enterprise Technology Research study found data quality, availability and governance are the top blockers...
FinanceFeeds Highlights Tech Overhaul Driving Global Brokerage Management
FinanceFeeds, the independent fintech newsroom, released a detailed analysis of how technology is reshaping the management of global brokerage firms. The report flags infrastructure modernization, platform experience, automated compliance and data‑driven decision‑making as the four pillars redefining speed, resilience and...
Simfoni Joins Hackett Group’s 2025‑2026 ‘50 to Know’ Procurement Leaders
Simfoni has been added to The Hackett Group’s 2025‑2026 “50 to Know” list, a roster of 50 procurement technology providers selected from roughly 220 evaluated firms. The recognition underscores Simfoni’s AI‑powered Strategic Spend Hub and its growing traction among complex,...
Dropbox Cuts 200 Hours Quarterly with TextQL
Dropbox saved 200 hours per quarter on a single data project thanks to TextQL. A single query can be pushed to all analysts for transparency and consistency. No more blind spots and duplicative efforts for data teams and embedded data scientists.
Analytic Edge Gains TikTok Measurement Partner Badge, Expands MMM Capabilities
Analytic Edge, an AI‑driven marketing analytics firm, secured official TikTok Measurement Partner status, allowing it to feed granular TikTok campaign data into its Demand Drivers™ Media Mix Modeling platform. The move gives advertisers real‑time insight into short‑form video performance and...
From First Principles: The Ideas That Built Snowflake — and What Comes Next
Snowflake’s 2016 SIGMOD paper earned the 2026 Test‑of‑Time Award, highlighting the company’s early vision of a cloud‑native data platform. The paper defined three core principles—unifying all data, leveraging cloud elasticity, and simplifying operations—that guided Snowflake’s architecture. Decoupling compute from storage...