In June, Snowflake announced the public preview of the external functions feature with support for calling external APIs via AWS API Gateway. With external functions, you can easily extend your data pipelines by calling out to external services, third-party libraries, or even your own custom logic, enabling exciting new use cases. For example, you can use external functions for external tokenization, geocoding, scoring data using pre-trained machine learning models, and much more.

With COVID-19, it has become clear that ideas and assumptions that worked in the past will no longer apply now and in the future. The region is expected to face its deepest economic slowdown since the 1970s due to COVID-19. Businesses might be wondering what to do next.

One of the many areas where machine learning has made a large difference for enterprise business is in the ability to make accurate predictions in the realm of fraud detection. Knowing that a transaction is fraudulent is a critical requirement for financial services companies, but knowing that a transaction that was flagged by a rules-based system as fraudulent is a valid transaction, can be equally important.

Well, it is International Fraud Awareness Week, focused on promoting fraud prevention and education. A fantastic initiative! Maybe I am naïve but I feel a bit sad that there is a need for “fraud week”. The insurance industry has a long and intimate relationship with fraud in many different ways. Insurance fraud can take place at a process or business function level, most notably in claims or underwriting.

As a specialized and mature form of embedded analytics, contextual analytics is a game-changer if you're a software vendor looking to further augment your customers’ user experience, without requiring developers to completely reengineer your offering. Contextual analytics blends the data your users need for decision-making right at the point of their daily work, directly inside the interface and transaction flow of your software.

Happy anniversary to us! Fifteen years ago, Talend’s founders anticipated the business need to have data accessible to all users across an organization. I’ve been with Talend since the beginning, and I wanted to celebrate this milestone by sharing our product innovation and evolution through the years. Talend was created with the idea that we could offer something new to the market: open source ETL.

This is part of our series of blog posts on recent enhancements to Impala. The entire collection is available here.

Imagine if you bought a beautiful lake house, invited all your friends to come and visit, and the lake was dry? Not much value and a little embarrassing, right? Now imagine you have that beautiful lake house and you have special water valves to control not just if there is water in the lake but also control the water quality, clarity, and what fish the lake is stocked with? Much more impressive, correct?

Here at Cloudera, we’ve seen many large organizations struggle to meet ever-changing and ever-growing business demands. We see it everywhere. Traditional on-premise architectures, which create a fixed, finite set of resources, forces every business request for new insight to be a crazy resource balancing act, coupled with long wait times, or a straight-up no, it cannot be done.

One of the things that I'm really passionate about is great design. Design is important in all aspects of our lives and it's really important for analytics as well. When you're the recipient of bad design, you know it immediately. Have you ever seen those emails that have been completely misaligned or sat through a PowerPoint where everything is in the wrong colors and fonts? How does it make you feel?