Due to incorrect information provided by the vendor, the story "SAP puts its HANA in-memory database in the spotlight," posted to the wire on May 16, contained an improper characterization of the hardware used in a database cluster set up by SAP.

Investors have taken note of the surging enterprise demand for tools that can manipulate and analyze massive volumes of structured and unstructured data.

Yahoo has joined a growing list of companies offering big data analytics as a service with its Genome offering this week.

SAP seems to be betting its future on its HANA in-memory database, spotlighting the technology once again at the Sapphire conference in Orlando Wednesday, announcing a slew of new applications, partnerships and functional enhancements for the system.

Salesforce.com's Heroku division this week rolled out two entry-level tiers for its Postgres-based cloud database service, hoping to cater to applications with lower data-volume requirements as well as helping startup developers make an easier jump into production.

The release of the first beta of version 9.1 of the open source PostgreSQL database has opened a new era in enterprise-class reliability and data integrity that can compete with the big names, say its developers.

People all over the world spend a total of eight billion minutes a day on Facebook. Some 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared every week, 400 billion Web pages are viewed every month and the site logs a staggering 25TB of data every day. David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, talks about how the social networking giant uses open source tools to achieve its massive app scalablilty.

IT infrastructure and services are not the first things to come to mind when you think of Danone Group, the US$3.5 billion company known for its Evian water and Dannon and Stonyfield yogurt brands. But when it comes to packaging and delivering water and yogurt, IT services and the automation they provide are indispensable.