Top 5 data stories of 2022: Teradata vs Snowflake, SQLite, privacy in Metaverse

2022 was an eventful year for the data industry. As global enterprises became laser-focused on making the most of their data assets, companies providing the infrastructure for the data stack took crucial steps to build out their offerings. Snowflake and Databricks debuted multiple industry-specific offerings as well as whole new sets of features, while Teradata made a move to take on the two. Questions about privacy in the metaverse also drew attention. 

Here are VentureBeat’s top five data stories of 2022:

Teradata takes on Snowflake and Databricks with cloud-native platform

In August, Teradata debuted two new offerings – VantageCloud Lake and ClearScape Analytics – to better take on competition Snowflake and Databricks. The VantageCloud Lake, as the company explained, extends its Vantage data lake to a more elastic cloud model while ClearScape helps enterprises take advantage of new analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) development workloads in the cloud. The combination of the two promises to streamline data science workflows, support ModelOps and improve reuse from within a single platform. 

The offering also takes advantage of Teradata’s various R&D into smart scaling, allowing users to scale based on actual resource utilization rather than simple static metrics. It also promises a lower total cost of ownership and direct support for more kinds of analytics processing. 

“Snowflake and Databricks are no longer the only answer for smaller data and analytics workloads, especially in larger organizations where shadow systems are a significant and growing issue, and scale may play into workloads management concerns,” Hillary Ashton, chief product officer at Teradata, said. 

Why SQLite may become foundational for digital progress

Open-source database engine SQLite made headlines as multiple companies, including Cloudfare and Fly, announced they are building projects around it. The engine is 20-years-old and written in plain, old C but is seen as a foundation to digital progress. According to developers, adding SQLite helps them provide more sophisticated applications. Data can be stored locally on an edge node and then eventually replicated throughout the world. Plus, its basic, single-threaded system often comes in handy in small projects.

“It’s really nice during development,” said Kent Dodds, a developer who frequently deploys SQLite in projects. “[There’s] no need to get a database server up and running (or a docker container). It’s just a file. You can even send the database file to a coworker if you need some help with something.”

Having that said, even as adoption increases, there are still plenty of wrinkles around SQLite (like the lack of supporting tooling) that will need to be addressed.

Metaverse (as we understand it now) is the next phase of the internet, but what happens to data privacy when it comes to the fore? It may well be another “clash of the titans.” The metaverse wants to harvest new, uncharted personal information, even to the point of noting and analyzing where your eyes go on a screen and how long you gaze at certain products. Data privacy, on the other hand, wants to protect consumers from this incessant cherry-picking. One can bet that in the new online economy of the future, plenty of new startups will be lining up on both sides.

22 open-source datasets to boost AI modeling

While data is the new oil, information gathered by the company alone may not always offer the variety needed for an AI/ML project. To address this, individuals, companies and governments share open-source datasets that are free to use and build upon. Their reason for sharing the data may differ from case to case, but the information might be what your project needs. VB’s list of top open-source datasets includes OpenStreet Map, Kaggle, U.S. census, Data.gov, Data.Europa.Eu, Data.Gov.UK, PLOS and Open Science.

Snowflake’s industry-focused data offerings

Finally, Snowflake announced industry-specific versions of its data cloud to serve retail, healthcare and life sciences industries. The move came in response to Databricks’ industry offerings and with the backing of various technology, data, application and consulting partners, including Equifax, Dataiku, H20.ai, Cognizant, Deloitte and Strata.