Jelani Harper, Freelance Journalist Profile

Articles

PostgreSQL 18 Delivers Significant Performance Gains for OLTP and Analytics

1 week ago | thenewstack.io | Jelani Harper

PostgreSQL 18, planned for release in September, has scores of new features and functions, spanning everything from analytics enhancements to support for external indices as extensions. The most notable updates of the relational database system, however, relate to a number of performance gains for what could be a watershed moment for the open source database.
Best of All Worlds: Confluent Synthesizes Streaming and Batch Processing

2 weeks ago | thenewstack.io | Jelani Harper

Data streaming platform provider Confluent unveiled a new feature today that allows users to analyze real-time and historic data with a single query. Available in early access through Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink, snapshot queries combine batch and streaming data approaches to support low-latency use cases with enrichment data. Confluent also unveiled IP filtering functionality for Apache Flink workloads and beefed up its private networking functionality for Flink.
Apache Airflow 3.0: From Data Pipelines to AI Inference

1 month ago | thenewstack.io | Jelani Harper

Approximately 10 years ago, Apache Airflow launched with a relatively simple, yet timeless premise. It was initially devised as a means to allow developers and data engineers to write data pipelines as code. With the recent release of the 3.0 version of the solution, the increasingly popular open source workflow management resource now offers a host of new features to support enterprise-scale applications.
The Open Format Movement Heats Up: Snowflake Embraces Apache Iceberg

2 months ago | thenewstack.io | Jelani Harper

Today, data warehouse giant Snowflake announced a significant increase in its support for Apache Iceberg tables. The expanded integration with the open table format lets Snowflake customers access Iceberg data as though it were no different than other data contained in the popular cloud data platforms. As a result, there’s now a host of Snowflake-enabled features that work with Iceberg tables, making the latter more secure, easier to share, and more performant for certain workloads.
Accounting for attention in speech-to-speech AI applications

2 months ago | datasciencecentral.com | Jelani Harper |Vincent Granville |Dan Wilson

The quantum leap forward in natural language technologies attributed to foundation models, LLMs, and modern vocal applications of AI is due in no small part to the mastery of the concept of attention. When training and deploying the aforementioned models, attention mechanisms account for several things. One of the most valuable is allowing models to look back at different parts of a conversation or text and determine how that context relates to present inputs (or lines of text).
The New Look and Feel of Apache Kafka 4.0

2 months ago | thenewstack.io | Jelani Harper

The recently introduced Apache Kafka 4.0 comes with a number of upgrades across nearly every aspect of the open source distributed event streaming platform. The recent release has numerous Kafka Improvement Proposals (KIPs) — which provide new functionality from the open source community — across Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and Kafka brokers, consumers, producers, and more.
Report: OpenSearch Bests ElasticSearch at Vector Modeling

2 months ago | thenewstack.io | Jelani Harper

A recent research report from analysis firm Trail of Bits highlights some of the key differences — representing critical considerations for contemporary information retrieval — between OpenSearch and Elasticsearch. OpenSearch and the Open Search Project were created by Amazon; OpenSearch’s search and analytics platform was forked from Elasticsearch. The offerings were evaluated with the OpenSearch Benchmark, which compares solutions according to various workloads.
Re-rankers maximize vector database retrieval results

2 months ago | datasciencecentral.com | Jelani Harper |Dan Wilson |Alan Morrison

There’s a really good reason almost every credible vector database—or enterprise application of this technology—incorporates re-ranking models, or re-rankers. It’s not just because these deep neural networks score vector retrieval engines’ results so they’re more useful for search and Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG). Quite simply, it’s because for most vector database use cases, no one has actually fine-tuned the embedding model on an organization’s specific, or proprietary, data.
GigaOm Radar for Data Access Governance

2 months ago | gigaom.com | Andrew J. Brust |Jelani Harper

Table of Contents Executive Summary Market Categories and Deployment TypesDecision Criteria ComparisonGigaOm RadarSolution InsightsAnalyst’s OutlookMethodologyAbout Andrew BrustAbout GigaOmCopyright 1.
Couchbase Edge Server Cuts Hardware Needs

Mar 4, 2025 | thenewstack.io | Jelani Harper

Couchbase’s release Tuesday of Couchbase Edge Server heralds a number of significant advancements for the growing prevalence and utility of edge computing. Firstly, since it was built on the core engine of Couchbase Lite, Couchbase Edge Server provides a multipurpose, NoSQL database that natively supports JSON and transactional and analytical workloads. Secondly, since it was designed to accommodate small form factor edge devices, it has minimal hardware requirements.