Author: Infoworld

In the good old days, databases had a relatively simple job: help with the monthly billing, deliver some reports, maybe answer some ad hoc queries. Databases were important, but they weren’t in constant demand.Today the picture is different. Databases are often tasked with powering business operations and hyperscale online services. The flow of transactions is incessant, and response times need to be near-instantaneous. In this new paradigm, businesses aren’t just informed by their database—they’re fundamentally built on it. Decisions are made, strategies are drafted, and services are personalized in real time based on vast streams of data. Relational databases sit at…

Apple has released Swift 5.10, an update to the company’s open-source programming language that reaches a major milestone: providing safety against data races via full data isolation in the concurrency model. The improvement prepares the way for the planned Swift 6 release.Binaries for Swift 5.10, introduced March 5, can be found at swift.org for Windows, macOS, and Linux.In explaining the milestone, Apple Swift engineer Holly Borla said an increasingly important source of undefined behavior is concurrent code that inadvertently accesses memory from one thread at the same time that another thread is writing to the same memory. This unsafety is…

Google has released an experimental API that allows large language models to run fully on-device across Android, iOS, and web platforms.Introduced March 7, the MediaPipe LLM Inference API was designed to streamline on-device LLM integration for web developers, and supports web, Android, and iOS platforms. The API provides initial support for four LLMs: Gemma, Phi 2, Falcon, and Stable LM.Google warns that the API is experimental and still under active development, but gives researchers and developers the ability to prototype and test openly available models on-device. For Android, Google noted that production applications with LLMs can use the Gemini API…

Entity Framework Core is an object-relational mapper, or ORM, that isolates your application’s object model from the data model. That allows you to write code that performs CRUD operations without worrying about how the data is stored. In other words, you work with the data using familiar .NET objects.In Entity Framework Core, the DbContext connects the domain classes to the database by acting as a bridge between them. You can take advantage of the DbContext to query data in your entities or save your entities to the underlying database.I’ve discussed the basics of DbContext in a previous article. In this article we’ll…

In the rapidly evolving landscape of IaaS cloud computing, public cloud providers are increasingly reaching feature and function parity. This means they are beginning to look alike.Before you keyboard warriors remind me that some obscure feature in the object storage system on one provider is better than the object storage feature on another provider, I know they are not exactly the same. I think it’s okay to consider that they are all moving to a similar group of services that do the same things.How did it get this way?This development creates a competitive dynamic between these providers and offers new…

LinkedIn has decided to open source its data management tool, OpenHouse, which it says can help data engineers and related data infrastructure teams in an enterprise to reduce their product engineering effort and decrease the time required to deploy products or applications.OpenHouse is compatible with open source data lakehouses and is a control plane that comprises a “declarative” catalog and a suite of data services.A data lakehouse is a data architecture that offers both storage and analytics capabilities, in contrast to the concepts for data lakes, which store data in native format, and data warehouses, which store structured data (often…

Apple has released Swift 5.10, an update to the company’s open-source programming language that reaches a major milestone: providing safety against data races via full data isolation in the concurrency model. The improvement prepares the way for the planned Swift 6 release.Binaries for Swift 5.10, introduced March 5, can be found at swift.org for Windows, macOS, and Linux.In explaining the milestone, Apple Swift engineer Holly Borla said an increasingly important source of undefined behavior is concurrent code that inadvertently accesses memory from one thread at the same time that another thread is writing to the same memory. This unsafety is…

Web development platform provider Netlify has added AI-enabled deploy assist capabilities to its Composable Web Platform.Unveiled March 7, AI-enabled deploy assist analyzes failed deployments and offers suggestions to correct errors. Netlify said the feature is intended to reduce the time developers spend manually reviewing logs and debugging failed builds, ensuring failed builds do not become bottlenecks and improving the developer experience.Netlify CTO Dana Lawson explained how the company’s AI addresses issues across toolsets. “When building composable architectures, teams are pulling in tools, content, and integrations that suit them best. When issues happen, it’s not always clear what part of your composable…

Passwords are a problem. While they remain the main way we secure applications, services, and systems, they’re increasingly vulnerable. Cloud compute makes it economical to brute-force valuable passwords, while poorly-thought-out password policies drive users to inherently risky behaviors. And while password managers make it easier to have separate complex passwords for everywhere we need them, other “security” policies block us from using those passwords.What was intended to be a secure internet is increasingly insecure, with our files, data, and finances at risk. It’s still a Wild West out there, and the question is, who will win that frontier? The good…

GitHub Enterprise Server 3.12, now generally available, introduces tag patterns for restricting deployment rollouts to GitHub Actions environments. The new release also introduces merge queues, a feature that automates pull request merges.Announced March 6, GitHub Enterprise Server can be downloaded from github.com.With the 3.12 version, developers can restrict deployment rollouts to select tag patterns in GitHub Actions environments. By configuring certain tags or tag patterns on protected environments, users can restrict which branches and tags can be deployed to those environments.Version 3.12 also allows developers to automate pull request merges using merge queues. Merge queues automate the process of validating…