As beforehand reported by AIM, the Snowflake-Databricks rivalry has entered the Postgres area, a transfer Databricks made official with its new product bulletins on the Knowledge + AI Summit 2025.
The corporate launched Lakebase,a completely managed Postgres database built-in with its Knowledge Intelligence Platform and constructed for AI-driven utility growth. Now in public preview, Lakebase provides an operational layer to the lakehouse ecosystem, enabling builders and enterprises to construct AI purposes and brokers on a single, multi-cloud platform.
“Postgres has primarily received because the lingua franca for open supply databases,” stated Databricks chief Ali Ghodsi whereas saying the product. He added that the very best factor about Postgres is the extensions that the neighborhood has constructed over time.
“It’s like an enormous ecosystem of extensions which might be obtainable, that allow you to do something, whether or not it’s vector processing, key-value retailer, or no matter you need to do — it’s all a part of Postgres open supply extensions.”
In line with Stack Overflow’s 2023 and 2024 Developer Surveys, PostgreSQL has surged in reputation, surpassing MySQL as essentially the most most well-liked database amongst builders.
Databricks is positioning Lakebase as a brand new entrant within the operational database market, concentrating on an area price over $100 billion. The database is powered by Neon’s structure, which separates compute from storage to help unbiased scaling. This design provides low latency, excessive concurrency, and excessive availability for transactional wants.
“We’re creating a brand new class within the database market: a contemporary Postgres database, deeply built-in with the lakehouse and at present’s growth stacks. With Lakebase, we’re giving [enterprises] a database constructed for the calls for of the AI period,” stated Ghodsi.
The corporate stated conventional operational databases are based mostly on legacy architectures and fall in need of fashionable AI use circumstances, which require speedy entry to real-time information and integration between analytical and operational methods. Lakebase addresses this by syncing routinely with lakehouse tables, supporting AI mannequin serving by way of a web based function retailer, and integrating with Databricks Apps and Unity Catalogue.
Lakebase is constructed on open-source Postgres, which advantages from a big developer neighborhood and is suitable with current instruments and extensions. It features a branching function that enables for copy-on-write clones of databases, helpful for agent-based growth and testing. The system launches in underneath a second and helps usage-based pricing.
Higher Than Legacy Databases
“OLTP databases at present, whether or not proprietary like Oracle or open supply like MySQL and Postgres, nonetheless look largely the identical as they did within the 90s, exhibiting little architectural evolution,” stated Databricks co-founder Reynold Xin.
He defined that Databricks Lakebase separates compute and storage into three layers to satisfy OLTP calls for. Knowledge is saved in scalable object shops, with a caching layer in between to scale back latency and handle WAL effectively. On prime, ephemeral Postgres nodes deal with read-write operations, enabling quick, elastic compute.
Xin added that Lakebase can assure prospects single-digit millisecond latency at scale.
Nikita Shamgunov, founding father of Neon, believes we’re getting into the age of AI-generated software program, the place AI brokers, not people, will more and more create purposes, together with the databases they depend on. “In a few years, I feel 99% of all of the databases on the platform shall be created by AI brokers. I feel we’re on the daybreak of the AI software program revolution, and each engineer is turning into an AI engineer.”
He additional defined how Neon’s structure, like branching and isolation, makes it supreme for AI brokers, who usually make errors and want protected, disposable environments. Shamguvnov expresses pleasure about constructing the very best OLTP system, totally built-in with information and AI platforms, bridging the hole between analytical and transactional use circumstances.
“Lakebase removes the operational burden of managing transactional databases,” stated Anjan Kundavaram, chief product officer at Fivetran. “Our prospects can give attention to constructing purposes as a substitute of worrying about provisioning, tuning and scaling.”
Equally, Jelle Van Etten, head of worldwide information platform at Heineken, stated, “Our analytical information platform is now evolving to be an operational AI information platform and must ship these insights to purposes at low latency.”
Databricks introduced that quite a few enterprises have participated in Lakebase’s personal preview. The purposes included retail personalisation, healthcare workflows, and agent-based experiences.
Higher Than Snowflake?
This new product from Databricks comes simply days after Snowflake acquired Crunchy Knowledge. Snowflake referred to as Postgres a best choice for builders on account of its flexibility, cost-efficiency, and native AI options resembling vector help (pgvector).
Snowflake Postgres builds on Snowflake’s earlier transfer into transactional information with Unistore, which mixes transactional and analytical workloads in a single system. Constructing on native PostgreSQL help, Snowflake Postgres extends that imaginative and prescient, providing enterprises a production-ready resolution for transactional purposes that require Postgres compatibility.
“We’re tackling an enormous $350 billion market alternative and an actual want for our prospects to carry Postgres to the Snowflake AI Knowledge Cloud,” stated Vivek Raghunathan, Snowflake’s SVP of engineering.
Everybody appears to be shifting to PostgreSQL, and Snowflake and Databricks are becoming a member of in by buying smaller gamers. It’s not nearly including extra databases, it’s about preparing for AI, real-time information and rising enterprise calls for.
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