TileDB Newsletter - December 2024

A new 1TB RAM server available for Notebooks

We have released a new Max server size for notebook instances on TileDB Cloud. The latest option offers 128 CPUs and 1TB of RAM. While TileDB offers extensive distributed query capabilities, this option is useful for any downstream analysis requiring massive datasets to be held in memory.

Navigate to Apps or Monitor on TileDB Cloud and launch a server to see this option. Note that this option is (currently) only available on our public SaaS deployment.

Multi-select actions available

Following our refactoring earlier this year, we removed some functionality from the catalog. We have now reintroduced multi-select actions, beginning with Add to group, remove & delete, and change credentials. This is key to be able to carry out bulk actions across many assets at once in your catalog.

Add multiple assets to a group for organisation.

Change the cloud credentials of multiple assets at once.

Unregister (or remove & delete from cloud storage) many assets at once.

Displaying regions on an asset’s detailed view

We’ve made updates to display the region where an asset is located in cloud storage and where compute activity is executed.

For all assets, navigate to its Overview page to see its region. Here, we can see that our New York Yellow Taxi Dataset array is located in us-east-1:

For task graphs, open its preview under the Logs page in Monitor, and you’ll see the region in which TileDB executed this activity in the top-right portion of the screen. Note that our distributed query on sample VCF data was executed in AWS us-east-1:

Both of these updates are important for teams working across the world in need of insights into an asset's data storage location. This is critical for governance and compliance. For example, you may require certain data not to cross certain regions, or you may want to avoid unnecessary egress costs, when you use assets from different regions in your analysis.

Check out the updates on your own assets now!

Display asset authors on an asset’s detailed view

We have added the functionality to display the author of an asset on its details page, giving visibility to everyone in the organization who created the catalog entry and—more importantly—a quick way to know who you need to follow up with if you have any questions or requests regarding the asset in question!

TileDB Academy

An innovative technology like TileDB needs a special place for onboarding, explaining complex concepts, and training our users on all the features of TileDB Cloud. Our documentation is now available through the TileDB Cloud product itself. When you log into your TileDB Cloud, you will see Academy in the global menu sidebar.

The content is incredibly extensive and covers features across all our verticals, including previously undocumented functionality. You will see specific Tracks that group together domain-specific knowledge, within which you can track your progress, marking pages as “read” as you go. Later, you will also be able to pin content that you might want to revisit. We will introduce quizzes, and you will also be notified of new documentation on new or upcoming features!

New read & write organization role

Companies often need to restrict the ability to remove or delete registered assets from their data catalog. With the previous (i.e. “until now”) set of permissions, a user assigned the read & write role could, by default, delete an asset registered under the organization. Many of you have requested the ability to further control who should have this power. This is extremely important for administrative governance and control, to further restrict critical functions to a subset of users.

We have responded to your requests with the introduction of a new read & write role, which does not permit the deletion of assets. The previously denoted read & write has been aptly renamed to read, write & delete. As an admin of your organization, you can now move all relevant users (who shouldn't have delete permission) to the new read & write role.

New free tier on TileDB, $100 free credits for 6 months!

We have launched a new free tier for individual users on TileDB Cloud SaaS! This tier entails $100 in free credits for 6 months. This is a great opportunity for new users, to give you a chance to evaluate the product & all functionality in full, without having to worry about billing, and until you are ready to talk to our sales team.

For access to this Free tier, simply click Apply for free tier on your Home screen and follow the instructions. Your application will be reviewed by a member of our staff within 24 hours.

For those users that can’t access the free tier just yet, you will still be able to browse our Academy and Marketplace, and of course continue using all of the amazing open source libraries our team works on.

Detail your intended use case and apply for the free tier!