19th Feb 2018 – Data Science News Daily Roundup

Oracle Database 18c, spaCy v2.0.8 released, Apache Phoenix 5.0.0-alpha released, and more in today’s top stories around machine learning, deep learning, and data science news.

1. Oracle Database 18c: Now available on the Oracle Cloud and Oracle Engineered Systems

Oracle announced that its Oracle Database 18c is now available on the Oracle Cloud and Oracle Engineered systems. The 18c is the first annual release in Oracle’s new database software release model, and is a core component of Oracle’s recently announced Autonomous Database Cloud. The 18c does not contain any seismic changes in functionality but there are lots of incremental improvements, which include:

• High performance analytics
• High availability
• Multitenant improvements
• Application Development
• Big Data and Data Warehousing
• Security improvements

To read more on the new features of Oracle Database 18c in detail, visit the documentation blog.

2. spaCy v2.0.8 released

spaCy is an open-source software library for carrying out advanced Natural Language Processing. Its v2.0.8 has been released with some new features, performance improvements and minor bug fixes.

The features and performance improvements are:

• NEW: Lexical attribute IS_CURRENCY via Token.is_currency for currency symbols.
• Add noun_chunks syntax iterator for Norwegian.
• Add get_beam_parse method in ArcEager.
• Revert changes to the Matcher in favour of the new and improved API (#1971) coming in v2.1.0.
• Fixes various typos and inconsistencies

For bug fixes and other detailed information, visit the GitHub Repo.

3. Turi Create 4.1.1 released

Turi Create is designed to simplify the development of custom machine learning models. The last major release of Turi Create was on December, 2017, which was Turi Create 4.0: the initial open source release by Apple.

Version 4.1.1 of Turi Create is released, which includes two fixes:

• import turicreate fails on macOS 10.12.6 (#256)
• Miscellaneous documentation consistency fixes

For source code and other information visit the GitHub repository.

4. Apache Phoenix 5.0.0-alpha released

Apache Phoenix is an open source, parallel, relational database engine that supports OLTP for Hadoop using the Apache HBase as the backing store. It enables OLTP and operational analytics in Hadoop for low latency applications. The Apache Phoenix 5.0.0 is an alpha release. This release is the first version of Phoenix which is compatible with Apache Hadoop 3.0.x and Apache HBase 2.0.x.

Known issues:

• The Apache Hive integration is known to be non-functional (PHOENIX-4423)
• Split/Merge logic with Phoenix local indexes are broken (PHOENIX-4440)
• Apache Tepha integration/transactional tables are non-functional (PHOENIX-4580)
• Point-in-time queries and tools that look at “old” cells are broken, e.g. IndexScrutiny (PHOENIX-4378)

Developers encourage users to test this release out and report any observed issues for the official 5.0.0 release quality to be significantly improved.

5. Cloudera Enterprise 5.14 released

Cloudera released its Cloudera Enterprise 5.14. This is a maintenance release and has fixed two issues, which were:

• Cloudera Manager upgrade workflow incorrectly requires deploying some optional management roles
• Logging issue slows down Hive and HDFS Replication jobs

For further details, visit the Cloudera documentation page.

6. Eggplant AI 2.0:  Machine Learning brought to Software Testing

Testplant released a new version 2.0 of its Eggplant AI. This version uses AI, machine learning, and analytics to intelligently navigate applications, predict quality issues, and correlate data, which can help product teams quickly identify and resolve issues.

Eggplant AI 2.0 Highlights:

• Uses AI and neural networks to auto-generate tests and focus test execution on the user journeys most likely to find defects
• Enables software and app vendors to keep up with the pace of DevOps and user expectations
• Helps improve the user experience