Data-as-a-service businesses offer paid access to data sets. These data sets can be useful for building products or training machine learning models.  There has been steady growth in the tools and practices around processing and storing data. But access to data sets remains a bottleneck for widespread development of machine learning applications in a large

A knowledge base assembles information from a wide variety of sources into a central platform. The most popular knowledge base is Wikipedia, which covers a wide variety of concepts through a system that attempts to remain authoritative and impartial. Other open knowledge platforms include Stack Overflow, which focuses on programming concepts, and Quora, which adds

Data engineering involves numerous tools–a data lake, databases, data warehouses, numerous APIs, streaming systems, and microservices. There is no shortage of ways to interact with data and manage data, but many companies are struggling to figure out design patterns and best practices for how to manage data and build data infrastructure. Zhamak Dehgani is a

The Hadoop ecosystem provided every company with the tools to store and query large amounts of data at a low cost. Since 2005, that ecosystem has expanded with more and more open source applications for data infrastructure.  Data infrastructure includes databases, data lakes, distributed queues, data warehouses, query engines, web applications, on-prem software, closed source,

In 2011, Facebook had begun to focus its efforts on mobile development. Mobile phones did not have access to reliable, high bandwidth connections, and the Facebook engineering team needed to find a solution to improve the request latency between mobile clients and the backend Facebook infrastructure. One source of latency was recursive data fetching. If

Facebook generates high volumes of data at a rapid pace. Dhruba Borthakur joined Facebook in 2008 to work on data infrastructure. His early projects at Facebook were around Hadoop, the distributed file system and MapReduce computation platform that laid the foundation for the “big data” movement.  At the time, Facebook was generating as much data

Data engineering allows a company to take advantage of the large quantities of data that the company has generated. In many companies, new data has been produced rapidly for many years, but the company has not been able to take full advantage of it.  Creating large data sets does not provide immediate value for a

ListenNotes allows users to find podcasts by categories, popularity, and search queries. ListenNotes is not a podcast client that you download onto your phone, but it allows users to build playlists. These playlists are automatically published to an RSS feed, so that users can curate a playlist on desktop and subscribe to that playlist from

FoundationDB is a multi-model distributed key-value store. It is fully ACID compliant and horizontally scalable. FoundationDB is not usually used directly by an application developer–FoundationDB is a foundational building block for higher level distributed systems such as the metadata store for data warehousing tool Snowflake. Ryan Worl is a software engineer who specializes in FoundationDB.

A new database company needs to solve numerous problems in order to succeed. There are already lots of existing database companies, so a new company needs to find a way to strongly differentiate itself. Databases are core infrastructure, so a new database company must earn trust with its customers. A database is a complicated distributed