Data science is saving and improving lives by leveraging sensor data and machine learning. Pivotal makes software platforms and database products to enable enterprises to make use of their data.

Sarah Aerni is principal data scientist at Pivotal.

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Streaming pipelines and in-memory analytics are difficult to support with old database systems. VoltDB provides streaming analytics with transactions.     Questions How does VoltDB exemplify Michael Stonebraker’s thesis that one size does not fit all? What is the difference between OLTP and Streaming? How does VoltDB serve the common Zookeeper-Kafka-Storm-Cassandra stack? What trends and

Graph databases use graph structures for semantic queries. Ryan Boyd is a developer advocate for Neo4j, an open-source graph database. Questions Why does Monsanto use graph databases? In a social network graph, how would you query for “people you may know”? What CAP tradeoffs does Neo4j make? Why isn’t BASE good enough? Links Hadoop and Graph

InfluxDB is an open-source time-series database. Time-series data can be used by for metrics and analytics. Paul Dix is the CEO of InfluxDB. Questions What differentiates InfluxDB from a regular database with a timestamp on every entry? What is the full-stack architecture of a typical user of InfluxDB? Why are distributed time series databases so

PipelineDB is a streaming SQL database. Derek Nelson is the CEO of PipelineDB. Questions What are continuous views? Why is PipelineDB a good fit for the Kafka+Storm+HBase-type architecture? How does PipelineDB affect the application tier or the browser tier? What are the latency guarantees for how long it takes raw data streams to be converted into the refined queries provided by a continuous view? What probabilistic data structures does PipelineDBContinue reading...

RethinkDB is an open-source database for the realtime web. RethinkDB pushes changes to the application rather than waiting for a request. Slava Akhmechet is the CEO of RethinkDB. Questions RethinkDB supports a “push” model rather than request handling. Why? What are some use cases for pushing data? What does the full-stack architecture look like when the database has push? What did you learn from the Meteor team? Is RethinkDB like aContinue reading...

MemSQL is a high-performance, in-memory database that combines the horizontal scalability of distributed systems with the familiarity of SQL. Nikita Shamgunov is co-founder and CTO of MemSQL. Questions What types of data does a user want to keep on disk versus on an in-memory database? How does MemSQL compare to MySQL? How do MemSQL users leverage Apache Spark? How does a user onboard with MemSQL? What are the engineering difficultiesContinue reading...

Hortonworks Data Platform is a managed Hadoop architecture for enterprises. Venkatesh Seetharam is a software engineer at Hortonworks. He has worked on several Apache projects, including Hadoop, Falcon, and Atlas. Questions include: Will Hadoop ever be so big we will have to start over from scratch? What is the YARN data operating system? How are customers of Hortonworks dealing with numerous managed Big Data providers? How do customers use ApacheContinue reading...

Presto is a low latency SQL language built for interactive analysis.   Christopher Berner works on Presto at Facebook. Questions: Is Presto for data scientists, developers, or everyone? What are the problems with Hive? How does Hive break a query into mapreduces? How do the clients, coordinators, and workers interact? Is Presto both fast and cheap? How does Presto tune Java to get speed improvements? What are the advantages toContinue reading...

Apache Kafka is a publish-subscribe messaging system rethought as a distributed commit log. Kafka serves as the central repository for data streams in a distributed system. Guozhang Wang is an engineer at Confluent, which offers a stream data platform built using Kafka. Questions include: What is a central repository for data streams? How does Kafka improve transportation between systems? How does Kafka allow for richer analytical processing? What are the rolesContinue reading...