Database management work will soon be mostly automated by AI agents, just like coding, according to the CEO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind the distributed database of the same name. Spencer Kimball told The Register that the proliferation of databases demanded by the explosion of AI agents in coding and business functions will mean that managing them in a largely manual way is out of the question. “Nobody's going to do manual work on a database, just like almost nobody's doing manual coding anymore,” he said. “A lot of people don't even know what’s within their code base anymore, like they only know the designs, specifications and guarantees. They're still verifying the software, but in the end they're just not down at the level of code, because it doesn't make sense. It's like nobody programs in Assembly,” he said. Kimball is among the tech CEOs with the commensurate background in software engineering to make such statements. He helped build Google’s Colossus distributed file storage system and, as a computer science student at UC Berkely, developed FOSS image editor GIMP, which continues to this day. In the time since, he has seen shifts in the level of abstraction before. “These cycles happen all the time. It's pretty easy to see what's coming next, because ultimately agents beyond coding are going to be increasingly complementing and supplementing human-driven workloads. They're going to use tools, tools are using APIs, and APIs are talking to operational databases, every single one. If you think about the implications of this massive scale-up of traffic, it means that operational databases are going to get busier, and a lot busier. We're talking about exponential scale-up,” he said. Cockroach Labs is not the only database company to see the level of AI agent demand on the enterprise as an opportunity. It’s where many vendors are positioning themselves. For example, vector database vendor Pinecone's idea is that by compiling a knowledge base of an organization's data structure and content, its technology can avoid burning through tokens back and forth between the data and AI agents. Tiger Data, the company behind TimescaleDB, has built Ghost, a technology designed specifically for developers working with AI agents, charging by compute, rather than by database. Cockroach Labs, whose customers include OpenAI, CoreWeave, Booking.com, and Cisco, is pitching the idea of an Agentic Database Cloud to address this demand. Among the elements will be elastic compute and storage separation, unified estate management, database virtualization and agentic operations. It expects to announce a product around this idea later this year. Nonetheless, in database estates, Kimball expects AI agents to act in an advisory role to avoid disruptions to operations. “You can imagine, the enterprise isn't eager to turn over the keys to production to an agent. These agents are a second pair of eyes,” he said. To this end, Cockroach has been building its own agents to improve its operations and how it manages databases. Kimball said it had built AI agents in a layered approach, giving agents sub tasks to perform and then allowing agents to manage those agents, and other agents that verify the approach taken. “There's all kinds of hand-offs, there's agents that help with migrations, agents that help with slow queries, agents that can diagnose problems with clusters, because they've been given the institutional knowledge. For example, our entire Zendesk history for the last two years — every customer ticket, every issue, the resolutions — has been digested and cross-indexed. The agents we're building are the engineering of the prompts, the handoffs and the quality control,” he said. The “thinking” is done by foundation models, he said. “We have some open-source ones we use that are very, very fast and inexpensive. Those do more… prosaic and mundane tasks that you do a lot of, quickly.” Kimball said Cockroach also uses proprietary models including OpenAI gpt-oss and Claude Opus. “We're trying to provide a replacement for a lot of human labor. We provide corporate ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ for database roles, that once you used to have to hire humans for, but you simply cannot do that at 10x the scale, much less 100x the scale. You have to find that way to get these agents to do extremely useful work, very consistently, at a level that is as good or increasingly better than humans. Frankly, there are things the agents can do that are so grungy you couldn't hire a human to do it, such as constantly looking through log files, and investigating threads. It's just too boring,” Kimball said. As such, Cockroach expects to be able to increase the scope of its products and the number of customers it serves, but only modestly increase its workforce. “You can do different things right now with your resources. You can try to scale the human teams, or you can figure out how to make the human teams more efficient, and that's what we're doing internally. Fundamentally, this is what we're going to do for our customers, because if you anchor yourself to what’s possible today, then you might say, 'Oh, the AI is not completely ready,' but like the speed at which these things are changing makes it all but inevitable at some point in the near future,” he said. Whether Cockroach’s vision will become reality or not, the database market will have to respond to AI in the enterprise, spending on which shows no sign of letting up. Nonetheless, if agents need databases, and databases need agents to manage them, maybe it's going to be turtles all the way down. ®
Live blog: the latest news from around the tournament
The last 32 continues with three more tantalising ties with World Cup co-hosts Mexico, tournament frontrunners France and dark horses Norway taking to the field once more. All three games promise plenty of drama and excitement.
Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappé will be two of the headline acts in Tuesday’s matches. Both players have hit the ground running, netting eight goals between them with more matches to come.
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Continue reading...Reckless exercise can lead to exertional rhabdomyolysis, a condition that has risen due to the popularity of high-intensity workouts
In January 2025, I attended my first bootcamp class.
I had spent the day hunched over my laptop, anxious and craving an intense workout that would dispel my worries. I booked the class at a nearby gym, and the five-star reviews promised the all-consuming exercise I wanted: “Militant style instructor, but very motivating,” read one. Another: “Hardest workout of my life; extremely rewarding.”
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Allan McNish has reflected on the Austrian Grand Prix after Audi narrowly missed out on scoring points.
Van alle dingen die ook al niet meer mogen zorgt het aankomend verbod op het levend koken van kreeften en krabben er wel voor dat we het snelst koken van woede. Het koken van krab en kreeft tot een krokant knaaghapje is kennelijk een soort mishandeling terwijl het er op foto's (zie hierboven) doorgaans juist uitziet als een warm bad. Bovendien mogen dan ook rivierkreeftjes niet meer levend gekookt worden terwijl rivierkreeftjes het verdienen voor eeuwig te branden in de hel. Tja, het mag allemaal niet meer omdat de jeu er niet alleen vanaf moet, de jeu moet volledig drooggekookt. En dan straks raar opkijken als gestoorde dierenbeulen die aan kreeften koken een dagtaak hadden zich uit frustratie weer ouderwets toeleggen op katjes, konijnen en ezels wurgen (of erger).
Moet het dan zo kreeftonterend? (RIP Kareltje 2009-2026)
In March 2025, the Euclid mission led by the The European Space Agency (ESA) enabled scientists to capture the highest resolution image ever taken of the dense, glowing center of the Milky Way galaxy. An enormous swarm of stars forms a bulge at the heart of the spiral, and researchers continue to search amid its billions of stars for exoplanets, or any planet that’s located outside of our solar system.
“The galactic bulge—the central region of our galaxy—is a vast, tightly packed structure filled mainly with old, cooler stars, giving it its characteristic yellow colour,” ESA says. The photograph, which is taken with visible light, allows scientists to pinpoint exoplanets and measure their mass by monitoring tiny changes in starlight over time in a process called microlensing.
ESA’s Euclid image captures more than 60 million stars, plus other phenomena such as nebulae, bright star clusters, and molecular clouds that appear like amorphous, dark splotches in front of the brighter areas. Incidentally, to the human eye, they serve as a visual guide or cue to the incredible depth of field the image has actually captured.
“For comparison, Euclid’s sharpness and sensitivity in visible light is similar to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s wide field camera,” ESA says. “But each pointing that Euclid captures in a few hours spans an area 270 times larger than Hubble’s field of view. To observe the same Euclid mosaic, the Keck Observatory would need around 2,000 hours.”
Zoom in on the Galactic Bulge Survey image on ESASky.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Scan More than 60 Million Stars in the Most Detailed Photo of the Milky Way Ever Taken appeared first on Colossal.
AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De Amsterdamse effectenbeurs sloot dinsdag aanzienlijk hoger en rondde daarmee het tweede kwartaal positief af. Vooral de chipbedrijven met een groot gewicht in de index zorgden voor de winst. Wereldwijd maakten chipaandelen op de financiële markten deze week weer een opmars, wat ook zijn weerslag had op chipfondsen ASML, Besi en ASMI in de AEX. Ook ebben zorgen over oplopende inflatie weg nu vijandelijkheden tussen de Verenigde Staten en Iran niet voor grote problemen voor de scheepvaart lijken te hebben gezorgd.
De AEX won 1,4 procent op 1080,17 punten. Daarmee is de index van de dertig meest verhandelde fondsen op de Amsterdamse beurs in het tweede kwartaal van dit jaar 12,5 procent gestegen. De MidKap ging dinsdag 0,2 procent omhoog tot 1068,28 punten. De beurzen in Frankfurt, Parijs en Londen stegen tot 1,4 procent. Ook op Wall Street zat de sfeer er goed in bij beleggers.
De uitschakeling van Nederland op het WK is een hard gelag voor de ploeg van Ronald Koeman. In Nederland is men eensgezind over wie de schuld moet krijgen voor de deceptie: Marokkanen.
"Je mag het zeker weer niet zeggen, maar van die jongens die Nederland zoekspeelden zat er geen enkele bij die Jan of Piet heet, zal ik maar zeggen", vat een Twitteraar het heersende sentiment treffend samen. "We moeten het beestje bij de naam noemen, dit waren allemaal waanzinnig voetballende mannen met een Noord-Afrikaans uiterlijk", vindt een ander. VVD-leider Yesilgöz Twitterde dat de ouders van de verantwoordelijken voor deze vernedering aangesproken moeten worden op de voetbalkwaliteiten van hun kinderen.
Voor sommige Nederlanders gaat het te ver om alleen maar de schuld bij Marokkanen te leggen. Zij wijzen erop dat als deze jongemannen meer kansen op werk zouden hebben, ze niet uit verveling de hele dag aan het voetballen zouden zijn.
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