Memory errors such as out-of-bounds reads and writes and use-after-free bugs have plagued applications for decades, causing problems ranging from minor execution glitches to global security nightmares. The infamous WannaCry, Slammer, and Heartbleed exploits, and the more recent LDAP Nightmare, for example, were all enabled by buffer overflows. These memory safety vulnerabilities stem from the…
The new version of Oracle’s Exadata platform, X11M, is now generally available, and promises improved performance on generative AI tasks such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for the same price as the old version. Exadata is Oracle’s hardware and software platform for running Oracle Database workloads on premises or in hybrid- and multi-cloud environments. The…
Oracle today unveiled the Exadata X11M, the latest in its line of high-performance appliances for AI, analytics, and OLTP workloads. The company says the X11M will give customers substantial speedups across the board at the same starting price as the Exadata appliance it replaces. Based on the latest generation AMD EPYC processors and Oracle Database…
Recent research from Gartner and IDC paints a sobering picture: Cloud providers are experiencing diminishing returns on their innovation investments. Cloud spending continues to grow, but industry analysts note that the pace of revolutionary new services has significantly slowed. Remember when cloud providers were dropping game-changing innovations every few months? Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)…
Generative AI has inspired a surge of interest in using data to improve the accuracy of business decisions. Business managers, data analysts, and citizen data scientists can now use prompts instead of SQL queries to ask questions, interact with large language models rather than dashboards, and scan ML-generated recommendations instead of exploring data for insights….
2024 was a year filled with AI possibilities; 2025 needs to turn those possibilities into realities. For that, we need the cloud companies to stop churning out “primitives” such as large language models (LLMs) and instead give developers solutions. In mid-2024 I suggested we need a “Red Hat for AI,” a company that can deliver…
Over the past two years, generative AI has been a force for transformation—and disruption—everywhere it’s landed. Education was no exception; if anything, schools were among the first institutions to grapple with AI’s implications. As students embraced ChatGPT and similar AI technologies for research, test preparation, and academic writing assistance, among other things, educators found themselves…
In a data-driven world, financial services organizations are racing to harness the transformative power of AI. However, this journey is not without challenges. We know AI has a data problem. Without the right data in the right place, even the most sophisticated AI strategies fall short. IT leaders in the financial services sector understand that…
We live in a world of big data and big compute. But what about big query engines? One of the startups developing software to keep up with big data and big compute is Voltron Data, which is headed by Josh Patterson. Patterson co-founded Voltron Data in 2021 with pandas creator Wes McKinney (a 2018 Person…
The perfect storm is coming that will force enterprises to rethink their cloud strategy. Cloud architecture will take center stage during 2025. This isn’t just another hype cycle. First, we need to talk about the elephant in the room: generative AI. The computational demands of running generative AI models make traditional cloud deployments look like…
