DataStax Extends AI Feature Engineering with Luna ML

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DataStax continues to expand its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with today's launch of its Luna ML service.

DataStax got its start over a decade ago as the leading commercial vendor behind the open source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database and has steadily expanded its portfolio in recent years. On January 12, DataStax acquired Kaskada, a private technology provider that develops AI feature engineering technology. Kaskada's technology provides a declarative query language that can help data scientists detail exactly what an AI model needs from a dataset.

When the company was acquired, all of Kaskada's technology was proprietary. Since the acquisition, DataStax has worked to make Kaskada open source to align with the rest of its portfolio. With the new Luna ML service, DataStax offers an enterprise-supported offering for open source Kaskada to help organizations deploy the technology as part of a machine learning (ML) workflow .

“Some companies are adopting open source directly, but many companies that are adopting open source want additional safeguards should something go wrong,” Davor Bonaci, DataStax CTO and EVP told VentureBeat. "Luna ML is support on top of open source, so you can get assurances, credibility, and help to run Kaskada open source reliably in full-scale production, no matter what. tomorrow."

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Register now How Kaskada has changed under DataStax

Before joining DataStax, Bonaci was CEO of Kasada (and he also co-founded the company). He noted that his small business benefited greatly from his acquisition for a variety of reasons.

At a fundamental level, Kaskada is now open source, which means it can benefit from a community of contributors both inside and outside of DataStax. The technology is now also being adopted by a much larger number of users, as DataStax has many Fortune 500 users among its user base. Larger-scale user requirements also mean that Kaskada has been enhanced to meet performance, security and reliability needs.

There is also integration into the broader DataStax portfolio which includes database and event streaming technologies. This integration will soon lead to big changes in the open source Cassandra database and the DataStax Aria cloud database as a service (DBaaS).

How Luna ML and Kaskada Drive Future Database Changes

Bonaci explained that Kaskada is an AI feature engine that connects to raw event-based data, performs calculations on it, and produces feature vectors that can then be stored in a database like Cassandra . Once the vectors are stored, a user can perform what is called a vector similarity search, i.e. when the database...