Databricks Revolutionizes Data and AI Landscape with New Operational Database, Free Education, and No-Code Pipelines
San Francisco, CA – June 12, 2025 – Databricks, the pioneering Data and AI company, today unveiled a suite of transformative innovations at its Data + AI Summit, setting a new benchmark for how enterprises and individuals interact with data and artificial intelligence. The announcements include the launch of Lakebase, a groundbreaking operational database built for AI; a significant $100 million investment in global data and AI education coupled with the Databricks Free Edition; and the introduction of Lakeflow Designer, empowering data analysts to build production-grade pipelines without coding. These advancements underscore Databricks’ commitment to democratizing data and AI, accelerating innovation, and closing the critical talent gap in the industry.
Databricks Unveils Lakebase: A New Class of Operational Database for AI Apps and Agents
What is it?
Databricks announced the launch of Lakebase, a first-of-its-kind fully-managed Postgres database built for AI. This new operational database layer seamlessly integrates into the company’s Data Intelligence Platform, allowing developers and enterprises to build data applications and AI agents faster and more easily on a single multi-cloud platform. Lakebase is powered by Neon technology and is designed to unify analytics and operations by bringing operational data to the lakehouse, continuously autoscaling compute to support demanding agent workloads.
When is the Launch Planned?
Lakebase is now available in Public Preview, marking a significant step towards its full availability.
Who Introduced?
Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO of Databricks, introduced Lakebase, stating, “We’ve spent the past few years helping enterprises build AI apps and agents that can reason on their proprietary data with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Now, with Lakebase, we’re creating a new category in the database market: a modern Postgres database, deeply integrated with the lakehouse and today’s development stacks.”
Why Does This Matter? Motivation: The Driving Forces Behind
Operational databases (OLTP) represent a $100-billion-plus market, yet their decades-old architecture struggles with the demands of modern, rapidly changing applications. They are often difficult to manage, expensive, and prone to vendor lock-in. AI introduces a new set of requirements: every data application, agent, recommendation, and automated workflow needs fast, reliable data at the speed and scale of AI agents. This necessitates the convergence of operational and analytical systems to reduce latency and provide real-time information for decision-making. Fortune 500 companies are ready to replace outdated systems, and Lakebase offers a solution built for the demands of the AI era.
Business Strategies
The launch of Lakebase is a strategic move to create a new category in the database market, emphasizing a modern Postgres database deeply integrated with the lakehouse and today’s development stacks. This strategy aims to empower developers to build faster, scale effortlessly, and deliver the next generation of intelligent applications, directly addressing the evolving needs of the AI era.
Key benefits of Lakebase include:
Separated compute and storage: Built on Neon technology, it offers independent scaling, low latency (<10 ms), high concurrency (>10K QPS), and high availability transactional needs.
Built on open source: Leveraging widely adopted Postgres with its rich ecosystem, ideal for workflows built on agents as all frontier LLMs have been trained on vast database system information.
Built for AI: Enables launch in under a second and pay-for-what-you-use pricing. Its unique branching capability allows low-risk development by creating copy-on-write database clones for developer testing and agent-based development.
Integrated with the lakehouse: Provides automatic data sync to and from lakehouse tables, an online feature store for model serving, and integration with Databricks Apps and Unity Catalog.
Enterprise ready: Fully managed by Databricks, based on hardened compute infrastructure, encrypted data at rest, and supports high availability, point-in-time recovery, and integration with Databricks enterprise features.
Lakebase Momentum
Digital leaders are already experiencing the value, with hundreds of enterprises having participated in the Private Preview. “At Heineken, our goal is to become the best-connected brewer. To do that, we needed a way to unify all of our datasets to accelerate the path from data to value,” stated Jelle Van Etten, Head of Global Data Platform at Heineken. Anjan Kundavaram, Chief Product Officer at Fivetran, added, “Lakebase removes the operational burden of managing transactional databases. Our customers can focus on building applications instead of worrying about provisioning, tuning and scaling.” David Menninger, Executive Director, ISG Software Research, highlighted that “By offering a Postgres-compatible, lakehouse-integrated system designed specifically for AI-native and analytical workloads, Databricks is giving customers a unified, developer-friendly stack that reduces complexity and accelerates innovation.”
Partner Ecosystem
A robust partner network, including Accenture, Airbyte, Alation, Fivetran, and many others, supports Lakebase customers in data integration, business intelligence, and governance.
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