Posted on

EU Privacy Shield and the Future of Data Regulation-Compliant DBs

On July 16, 2020, the European Court of Justice got rid of the four-year-old Privacy Shield agreement struck between the U.S. and the EU that had exposed Europeans to possible U.S. surveillance. The agreement had also allowed U.S. companies like Facebook and Google to store data about European residents outside of the region. 

This move is yet another great example of the EU doing “right” by their constituents and holding tech companies responsible for their users' data privacy. The news also builds on the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) leadership, extending its consumer protections and providing a model for the rest of the world to work from as global data privacy policies continue to evolve.

Posted on

Distributed SQL: An Evolution of the Database

As organizations transition to the cloud, they eventually find that the legacy relational databases that are behind some of their most critical applications simply do not take advantage of the promise of the cloud and are difficult to scale. It is the database that is limiting the speed and effectiveness of this transition. To address this, organizations want the reliability of a tested relational data store, such as Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, and MySQL, but with the benefits of scale and global coverage that comes with the cloud

Some have turned to NoSQL stores to try to meet these requirements. These alternatives can typically meet the scale requirements but then fall short as a transactional database because they were not designed from the ground up to provide true consistency. Recently, some of the NoSQL solutions have offered “ACID transactions” but they’re full of caveats and fail at delivering isolation levels necessary for mission-critical workloads like a financial ledger, inventory control, and identity management.