January 2021 Summaries

Today, Martin Luther King Jr. is celebrated as one of America's greatest leaders for his transformative ability to move forward in regard to the civil rights movement in the United States and throughout the world. He sought equality and human rights for African Americans and others through peaceful protest. A great leader must possess commitment, determination, clarity, vision, and inspiration. King demonstrated these qualities, exemplifying courage for his convictions, eloquence, persuasion, passion, reason, and practicality. His commitment was unwavering, while his determination and clarity of speech motivated millions. He had a transformative mindset, respecting others and enabling him to bring about lasting change. King's leadership power was conveyed through his actions, clarity of vision, and belief in what he sought to accomplish. His legacy affords us powerful lessons for everyday leaders to make a positive impact at home, work, with peers, and within family.

As data professionals, our home and work lives have blurred due to the pandemic, leading to a significant increase in digital services usage. This surge in digital services has a substantial impact on electricity consumption, with estimates suggesting that data centers alone account for 2-3% of all electricity usage in the US. However, efficiency improvements in data centers have reduced their electricity consumption growth rate over the last two decades. To minimize our carbon footprint, we can adopt energy-saving tips such as installing programmable thermostats, replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs, and unplugging devices when not in use. Moreover, managing our IT decisions, including data storage and processing, is crucial in reducing our carbon impact. By consolidating workloads on diverse data structures and adopting a modern approach to data management, we can simplify our data estate, conserve electricity, and reduce the carbon footprint of our digital services usage.

With the world still recovering from COVID-19, companies that adopt strategic Digital First Strategies are expected to make big gains in 2021. As data continues to reign supreme with the global roll-out of 5G, businesses need to ensure they're ready to capture market share and be successful in the #DataRevolution. To achieve this, companies should build a Global Versioned Data Lake, prioritize security top of mind, develop for scale in mind, adapt for multi-cloud, design for performance, upgrade technology frequently, tune and optimize for incredible performance, renew their training and education efforts, open source software for community initiatives, and provide open access to all developers.

SingleStore has introduced an APPROX_PERCENTILE function to estimate percentiles for a distribution of values, providing a faster and near-exact alternative to traditional percentile functions like PERCENTILE_CONT. This new function leverages the performance benefits of SingleStore's database and uses the T-digest algorithm to achieve accurate results with minimal data sorting. By using APPROX_PERCENTILE, users can speed up their percentile calculations without sacrificing accuracy, making it an ideal solution for analyzing large datasets where exact calculations would be too slow or impractical. The function offers adjustable accuracy parameters and is designed to work well on massive datasets, providing a reliable and efficient way to calculate percentiles in real-world applications.