This past week featured a number of Big Data developments. Cloudera released an open-source authentication engine for Hadoop, Google upgraded its Cloud Platform with new data management capabilities, and DataStax raised $45 million in funding to accelerate Cassandra development. EnterpriseDB also put itself in the limelight with new statistics that indicate the government is one of the fastest adopters of PostgresSQL.

Cloudera dubs Sentry as the “industry’s first fine-grained authorization solution” for Hadoop. The open source RBAC tool includes an array of features, the most notable of which is the ability to block users from accessing data sets that are not essential for their work. This function can potentially come in very handy for healthcare providers, financial services firms and other organizations that deal with large volumes of sensitive data.

Cloudera and Google may operate in different industries, but they’re both determined to help users tame their data. The search giant bolstered its platform-as-a-service solution with new data management capabilities. The update introduces object lifecycle management, automated data deletion and versioning optimization, and the option to move data to the same facility that houses your instances.

Google rolled out these new features around the same time DataStax announced it has received $45 million in Series D from Scale Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, Next World Capital and existing investors. The Cassandra distributor said in a statement that the capital will be used to expand into new markets and accelerate R&D.

EnterpriseDB is another database distributor that made headlines last week. The company revealed that the number of government agencies that uses its PostgreSQL software surged by 40 percent in the past 12 months. NASA and the DoD are among the more than 40 agencies that deployed EnterpriseDB solutions in their data centers.