What you missed in Big Data: Hadoop and more AI

Organizations are moving more and more of their analytics workloads to the cloud in a bid to reduce operating expenses. One of the vendors trying to capitalize on the trend is Microsoft Corp., which last week rolled out a set of major improvements to its managed Hadoop service in an effort to attract more enterprise customers. Arguably the most important addition is support for the new LLAP (Live Long And Process), a method of caching data in memory to speed up database analytics in the Apache Hive data warehouse. It enables analysts to run database queries up to 25 times faster than before. It's joined by a set of security features that make it possible to regulate who accesses what data, monitor activity and use a company's internal cryptographic keys for encryption.