Why vector databases are having a moment as the AI hype cycle peaks GenAI spurs demand for vector search startups, but database giants are also taking noteVector databases are all the rage, judging by the number of startups entering the space and the investors ponying up for a piece of the pie.
“Working with visual search and robotics at Amazon was when I really looked at vector search — I was thinking about new ways to do product discovery, and that very quickly converged on vector search,” Clark told TechCrunch.
“I think the same is likely to happen with vector databases,” Zaitsev told TechCrunch.
“Our pitch is, ‘we do advanced vector search in the best way possible.’ It is all about specialization.
At some point, users will face limitations if vector search is a critical component of your solution.”
Hackers are threatening to publish a huge stolen sanctions and financial crimes watchlist The stolen World-Check database contains 5.3 million recordsA financially motivated hacking group says it has stolen a confidential database containing millions of records that companies use for screening potential customers for links to sanctions and financial crime.
The hackers, which call themselves GhostR, said they stole 5.3 million records from the World-Check screening database in March and are threatening to publish the data online.
A portion of the stolen data, which the hackers shared with TechCrunch, includes individuals who were sanctioned as recently as this year.
The incident involves a third party’s data set, which includes a copy of the World-Check data file.
Banking giant HSBC shut down bank accounts belonging to several prominent British Muslims after the World-Check database branded them with “terrorism” tags.
NoSQL database Aerospike today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E round led by Sumeru Equity Partners.
In 2022, Aerospike added document support and then followed that up with graph and vector capabilities — two database features that are crucial for building real-time AI and ML applications.
“We were founded primarily as a real-time data platform that can work with data at really high scale, or, as we call it, unlimited scale,” Aerospike CEO Subbu Iyer said.
So our premise has held good that real-time data and real-time access to data is going to be important pretty much across every industry.
“Aerospike, with its impressive customer base and performance advantage at scale, is uniquely positioned to become a foundational element for the next generation of real-time AI applications.”
In addition, Redis today announced that it has acquired storage engine Speedb (pronounced ‘speedy-bee’) to take it beyond the in-memory space.
Redis license changesIn some way, the licensing move is no surprise.
We’ve seen other open source companies like MongoDB, Elastic and Confluent make similar moves.
He is also quite aware that these new license mean Redis won’t be considered open source, at least according to the definition of the Open Source Institute.
Because of the BSD license, Redis wasn’t able to put its latest innovations into Redis Core, meaning it was missing features like search and query, for example.
MIT professor Mike Stonebreaker has been at the forefront of database technology for over 50 years.
Now 80, he knows a thing or two about database technology and launching companies.
His latest project, DBOS, puts the database at the center of the software stack, reducing the operating system to a small kernel of low level functions.
“The genesis of the project was OLTP (online transaction processing) database systems have gotten a lot faster in the last 15 years.
And so the thesis was that they would be competitive as a new operating system stack,” he told TechCrunch.
The Asian technology and internet company YX International manufactures cellular networking equipment and provides SMS text message routing services.
YX International claims to send five million SMS text messages daily.
But codes sent over SMS text messages are not as secure as stronger forms of 2FA, such as an app-based code generator, since SMS text messages are prone to interception or exposure — or in this case, leaking from a database onto the open web.
TechCrunch found in the exposed database sets of internal email addresses and corresponding passwords associated with YX International, and alerted the company to the spilling database.
YX International would not say for how long the database was exposed.
MariaDB is the subject of another potential takeover bid, as the company behind the eponymous open source relational database management system (RDBMS) confirmed it had received a provisional offer from California-based K1 Investment Management.
In the months that followed, MariaDB received its first “unsolicited non-binding indicative proposal,” this time from existing investor Runa Capital which tentatively offered $0.56 per share in cash.
Three weeks later, Runa stated that it wouldn’t be acquiring MariaDB after all, but instead an associate company called RP Ventures would be providing a $26.5 million loan.
This news led MariaDB’s stock to more than double in a couple of days, which is why K1 is making its bid relative to MariaDB’s closing price before any forbearance agreement was announced.
So in many ways, K1 is perhaps better suited to take over MariaDB than Runa was, even if it ultimately decides against it.
That’s the driving idea behind Nile, a startup that aims to create this data system with serverless Postgres at its core.
This could be authentication, billing, and so on.”Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly the problem Nile tries to solve.
The idea here is that every SaaS company has a data layer at its core and since we are talking about SaaS companies, they all have to solve for multi-tenancy in some form or another, no matter whether they are in the B2B or B2C space.
Traditionally, the team argued, solving problems around data and database management was always an application problem rather than a database problem.
Nile is turning this on its head by making multi-tenancy a core feature of its Postgres solution and by separating the data layer from the compute layer.
Qdrant, the company behind the eponymous open source vector database, has raised $28 million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital.
The vector database realm is hot.
In recent months we’ve seen the likes of Weaviate raise $50 million for its open source vector database, while Zilliz secured secured $60 million to commercialize the Milvus open source vector database.
We are proud to share that this new X AI feature just announced by @elonmusk is powered by the Qdrant Vector Database.
Right, using a Vector Database, powered by Qdrant.
Database management giant MongoDB says it’s investigating a security incident that has resulted in the exposure of some information about customers.
In an update published on Sunday, MongoDB said does not believe hackers accessed any customer data stored in MongoDB Atlas, the company’s hosted database offering.
For one customer, this included system logs, MongoDB said.
System logs can include information about the running of a database or its underlying system.
MongoDB declined to say how many customers may be affected by the compromise of its corporate systems.
