Exasol V7: unlock more data at speed for improved businesses agility
New Data Vault, Unstructured Data and AI/ML features with support for GPUs transform an organisation’s ability to work with more of its data and react quickly to change and opportunity.
Exasol, the analytics database, launches Exasol V7, bringing unmatched speed, performance, accuracy and insight to enhance organisations’ use of data. The new features empower businesses, giving them the ability to rapidly adapt to the dynamically changing world around them. Exasol V7 gives users the freedom and focus to run analytical models on even larger data volumes to quickly find more business-critical answers. These deeper insights can transform passive employees into data-driven teams, supported by the infrastructure they need to extract more value from data.
Businesses are amassing data at rapid speeds and need a powerful database that will scale with them, and turn data into business value quicker, easier and more efficiently than ever before. This requires reducing complexity in the technology stack and achieving the flexibility needed to deal with both large data volumes and the growing user base that applies data analytics for decision making.
Mathias Golombek, CTO of Exasol explains,“The business environment is characterised by increasingly high levels of uncertainty and change. Alongside this, the exponential complexity and growth of data sources and formats has heightened business demand for more and more flexibility. Organisations need to ensure they’re building a sustainable data architecture that allows them to solve data challenges now and in years to come. Exasol V7 really ramps up what data-driven organisations are able to do with their data. Many businesses now have the skills and the data to push the boundaries of what’s possible when it comes to analytics — our database is equipped to handle whatever they can throw at it.”
“Today, more than ever, organisations need to build resilience and agility into their decision making and processes,” commented Philip Carnelley, AVP of European Software Research at IDC. “Our latest research shows that one of business’s top three priorities right now is to ramp up investment in analytics and data to minimise the impact of the current recession and prepare for the future. Businesses must exploit their rapidly expanding and valuable data assets using AI and ML, to create truly intelligent operations that power their innovation agenda, as recovery and growth returns to the economy.”
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Key to unlocking competitive advantage and business agility, Exasol V7 allows businesses to bolster AI/ML model training with GPUs and improve the performance of their Data Vault models. It also improves the use of Unstructured Data.
- GPUs – The rapid adoption of AI/ML means organisations need to build or utilise a data infrastructure that is scalable and flexible enough to meet quickly evolving and expanding AI workloads. Supporting the use of GPUs, Exasol V7 provides the speed and performance needed when training and retraining AI/ML models on large data sets and remove barriers to entry for deep learning. Moreover, the ability to run different AI/Ml workloads across on-premises and the cloud can provide the flexibility needed for a cost effective, scalable and secure AI solution. For example, enabling more accurate, faster diagnoses in healthcare and offering acutely personalised customer experiences in retail.
- Data Vault 2.0 – Being agile in data analytics is crucial given the continued growth in the variety, volume and distributed nature of data. Data Vault modelling in Exasol V7 helps overcome the challenge of traditional dimensional and normalised data modelling techniques that aren’t designed to respond to rapid business change. In Data Vault 2.0, all keys are stored as hashes. These hashes help quickly join and compare data from multiple tables and schemas, to improve query performance, create better user experiences and open up previously prohibitive analysis.
- Semi-structured Data (JSON Function) – Semi and unstructured data is much trickier to analyse than structured data, but is far more prolific in the enterprise. Industry research predicts that 80% of worldwide data will be unstructured by 2025, influenced by the abundant rise of IoT and social media content. A unified 360° view of different data types is therefore imperative for businesses to stay competitive and make informed decisions. Exasol V7 natively supports multiple data formats (structured and semi-structured) within one database engine bringing the benefits of scale and performance to more types of data. In Exasol V7, JSON functions are natively integrated in SQL and can be executed directly in the database without the need for User-Defined Functions (UDFs). Offering these native functions means the richness of the data is preserved and there’s no need for complex ETL or any up-front modelling.
Exasol Expert, Peter Kioko, software developer at Grant Street Group had early access to the platform and said, “We are excited about this release, we ran our test suite against it and it performed really efficiently. In particular, the JSON feature will replace some of the custom JSON UDFs I built myself, which will make life easier. We will also begin using the hash data type feature in the near future.”
Exasol V7 will be available from 28th July 2020. Discover all the new features here.
