In the era of real-time analytics, organizations not only require an economic way of storing the vast amounts of information generated by their daily operations but also the ability to quickly access that data whenever the need arises. The latter requirement has proven the more difficult of the two to meet due to the complex logistics of maintaining sub-second processing latency across an entire corporate network, which is what RethinkDB Inc. is tackling with the new iteration of its namesake document store that debuted last week.

The upgrade brings what is described as an up to 50 percent improvement to the scalability and performance of its already speedy data distribution mechanism, which allows applications to subscribe to updates using a feed that follows the same basic principle as RSS. New information is thus automatically ingested without the delay of sending an access request to RethinkDB and then waiting for a response, enabling real-time services to operate with a lot less delay than traditional alternatives allow. That checks latency off the list, but there are still many obstacles standing in the way of high-performance analytics.

For large-scale business intelligence use cases, the biggest challenge can be the data itself, which is often measured in the petabytes. There is no shortage of solutions that offer to help organizations deal with the load, but most are too complicated for the everyday business users who depend on the information the most. Looker Inc. hopes to lower the entry barrier with a new series of custom code templates for one of the most popular tools in the bunch, Google Inc.’s BigQuery, introduced last week to simplify certain key data management operations like optimizing the performance of requests.

Organizations are still on their own when it comes to aggregating that information, however. Adobe Systems Inc. hopes to simplify the task with a new exchange added to its audience measurement suite against the backdrop of Looker’s announcement that allows customers to trade data with one another directly through the platform instead of carrying out such transactions manually. Reducing the amount of hassle involved in the process holds the potential to make accessing third party consumer metrics much simpler, and thus faster, for the business users who need them.

Image via Geralt