The Mid Week News 18/07/2018 edit 
Ok - news time again, and this weeks sees the release of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 3.0…
Technology updates (details are on the relevant technology pages):
- Apache Phoenix has hit 5.0
- Hortonworks Data Platform has hit the big 3.0 - lots of info after the link
- Apache Ambari has hit 2.7
- Hortonworks SmartSense has hit 1.5
Other technology news:
- From DataBricks - why their platform is the best for running Spark due to the level of automation of scaling, management and monitoring - link
- From AWS - running Spark pipelines using Apache Airflow and Apach Livy on Amazon EMR - link
- From ZDNet - views on Kafka and it’s uptake - link
- Looks like Azure SQL Data Warehouse just got a performance boost, now making it (allegedly) cheaper and faster than Redshift - link; benchmark summary
- Snowflake is now available on Azure (as well as AWS) - link
- Tamr has secured a new funding round - link
- Benchmarking for ElasticSearch - Rally has hit 1.0 - link