We’re continuously releasing new capabilities to enable more people to be productive and compliant when working with Apache Kafka. Our engineers have been hard at work on a great Christmas present for our amazing community of Kafka users. Before unwrapping our latest and greatest release, here’s a sneak peak of what’s inside.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve successfully completed PCI (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) Service Provider Certification. This means that at Logit.io we are committed to the security of storing, processing and transmitting credit card transactions.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the lifeblood of the economy: according to Deloitte, companies with fewer than 500 employees represent 99.7 percent of all businesses in the U.S., and employ 48 percent of the private workforce. Yet despite their sheer numbers, SMBs don’t have access to the power, budget, and resources that larger organizations can wield, particularly when it comes to digital transformation.

APIs (application programming interfaces) are an essential, yet often overlooked, component of the modern organization’s IT environment. According to a 2020 study, 83 percent of IT professionals and executives say that API integration is “critical” to their business strategy. These days, a single organization may rely on dozens or hundreds of third-party APIs, each of which may have a significant downstream effect on a company’s productivity and profitability.

We’re excited to share that after adding ANSI SQL, secondary indices, star schema, and view capabilities to Cloudera’s Operational Database, we will be introducing distributed transaction support in the coming months. The ACID model of database design is one of the most important concepts in databases. ACID stands for atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability. For a very long time, strict adherence to these four properties was required for a commercially successful database.

Across nearly every sector working with complex data, Spark has quickly become the de-facto distributed computing framework for teams across the data and analytics lifecycle. One of most awaited features of Spark 3.0 is the new Adaptive Query Execution framework (AQE), which fixes the issues that have plagued a lot of Spark SQL workloads. Those were documented in early 2018 in this blog from a mixed Intel and Baidu team.