The "Real" Year in Review - Cloud Database Insider🤦‍♂️

Folks, please disregard the first email that I sent earlier today.

My apologies, but I set a placeholder for it to go out today, but I have been putting out many other fires with the production of the newsletter. I am sure you are more concerned with last minute shopping before tomorrow.

Please just delete the earlier email from today.

Here is the “real” Year in Review when it comes to Cloud Databases:

1. The convergence of Databricks and Snowflake as both of the monoliths are encroaching on each others sweet spots.

2. The advent of Vector databases into the mainstream, almost.

3. The rise again of Oracle and becoming relevant again with announcement of Project Stargate, and becoming a serious player in AI and databases, plus their multi-cloud push.

4. The acquisition by Databricks of Neon, which is a serverless Postgres offering.

5. One of my favourites is the stature of Postgres. Not fun to use, but it gets the job done in the AI world.

6. The introduction of HorizonDB which is a new, managed PostgreSQL service from Microsoft recently announced.

7. Databases for Agentic AI, primarily from GCP (AlloyDB, Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Firestore, Memorystore, and Spanner).

8. SQL Server 2025 announcement with features such as built-in AI integration, native vector search, JSON support, and developer enhancements.

9. The Salesforce acquisition of Informatica.

10. ClickHouse expanded its ecosystem via observability acquisitions, supporting cloud analytics workflows. They are kind of a big deal now.

Once again folks, sorry about the confusion earlier today. I just had to get this out as soon as I could.

My usual Monday morning newsletter is a multi-evening and weekend affair to put together, but the above 10 points are many of the things that I have thought about over the last 12 months.

I may take a quick break, and return to normal on the 5th of January, or a may put out a final, normal newsletter this upcoming Monday.

Thanks for sticking with me this year. I really appreciate you reading my newsletter and I really love putting this newsletter together weekly.

We are almost at 3000 subscribers. I started this newsletter just over a year ago in November, 2024. I have a lot in the works for the new year.

Thank you for reading this, and enjoy the rest of the year. Hopefully you have some time off.

Gladstone Benjamin