My Most-Viewed Articles: On Larry Ellison, Multimodal AI, Booming Data
The Cloud Database Report's Top 5 posts over the past 12 months
Hello and welcome to the Cloud Database Report. I’m John Foley, a long-time tech journalist, including 18 years at InformationWeek, who then worked in strategic comms at Oracle, IBM, and MongoDB. I invite you to subscribe, share, comment, and connect with me on LinkedIn.
It’s near impossible to keep up with the pace of change. AI, AGI, ML, LLM, RAG, GPU, RLHF, NLP, vectors, multimodal, agents, copilots, training, inference, reasoning, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Claude, Gemini, Manus….
You with me? The above list just scratches the surface of the 24x7 buzz. I saw this in Fortune’s Data Sheet newsletter recently: “The speed [pace of change] is an issue,” a fintech executive said. “I cannot keep up.”
I hope the Cloud Database Report helps people sort it out. With that in mind, here are the Top 5 most-viewed articles over the past 12 months, the ones that have proven popular with our audience.
#1 Larry Ellison on AI
You can’t have good AI without good data. That explains why Oracle, the Oracle database, and the company’s high-profile leader get so much attention. This article on the launch of Oracle Database 23ai explains the AI advances in what may be the world’s leading enterprise database.
#2 The rise of independent voices
I launched the Cloud Database Report on Substack four years ago. It has grown steadily in part through the Substack ecosystem of independent publishers and subscribers who value its non-traditional media model. Here are some of my favorite Substacks on data and AI.
#3 Database potpourri
I wrote this blog post before a trip to Ireland last fall, hence the reference to the Book of Kells. I’m about to go back and will be in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day. Like a good Irish stew, this article has a lot to chew on!
#4 The new types of AI data
The word “data” can mean many things. The term can be traced back 79 years in the context of computing. What is AI data? It takes different forms: structured, unstructured, semi-structured, multimodal, synthetic, metadata, agentic. Here’s a quick guide.
#5 Even more processing, even more data
There’s Moore’s Law (the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18-24 months) and Foley’s Law (data volumes will grow 1 million times over 25 years). I did a calculation and found these two trends to be in lockstep. Now, both laws may be accelerating due to the multiplying effect of GPUs in hardware and AI in data generation.
Bonus reading
Finally, here are two articles that caught my attention from writers I follow.
An interesting piece by Alex Kantrowitz that gets to the heart of the timely and controversial debate over whether AI will displace human workers.
And this AI roundup by Charlie Guo, including a new general-purpose, autonomous AI agent developed in China.
Nice roundup, John, and it’s a sign you’re giving people what they want. Enjoy St. Pat’s in Dublin.