This week was a very notable one for big thanks to a handful of updates, and a new startup that might just change the way we think of big data today.  Trifacta raised $$4.3 million from Accel’s Big Data fund for a solution that doesn’t just visualize insight, but also the analytics tools that produce it.

The Trifacta team is developing an abstraction layer for Hadoop, MySQL and other databases that will spin code and queries based on simple instructions provided by the business users. The startup says its upcoming development will prove advantageous for both decision-makers and data scientists.

sqrrl, another up-and-coming big data startup, also had a milestone update. This week it announced a partnership with Hortonworks. The Hadoop distributor and service provider intends to make use of the company’s still-in-development cell-based security tech.

sqrrl was founded by NSA veterans, and its staff has a very similar composition. The intelligence community is certainly doing its best to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to big data and security, more so now that In-Q-Tel is pushing Cloudant’s DB-as-a-servcie to government agencies.

IQT is a joint venture between the CIA and a few other agencies that’s in charge of identifying and supporting new technologies with potential to aid the intelligence community. The organization deemed the Cloudant Data Layer suitable for government use this week, which is a big pat on the back – and a hug PR boost – for the cloud service provider.

Public infrastructure operators are also  leveraging big data, but have a difficult time managing their end points in an efficient manner. That’s why, according to a recent Pike report, managed services will become a $2.2 billion market in this sector in the next decade.