Enter Lakebase, an innovative approach that redefines operational databases for greater agility, openness, and seamless AI integration. This operational database architecture designed to meet not only today’s requirements but also tomorrow’s rapidly evolving, AI-powered workloads.
As businesses grapple with the limitations of traditional OLTP systems, Lakebase sets a new standard for flexibility and future-proof scalability.
Core Innovations Powering Lakebase
- Open Source Foundation: Lakebase is built on open source principles, specifically leveraging the reliability and extensibility of Postgres. This foundation offers broad compatibility, transparency, and freedom from vendor lock-in, empowering organizations to adapt as their needs change.
- Separation of Storage and Compute: By decoupling these two elements, Lakebase allows organizations to scale resources independently. Data persists in open object store formats, reducing costs and ensuring data portability beyond proprietary systems.
- Serverless and Elastic Operation: Unlike legacy databases that require constant upkeep and infrastructure management, Lakebase operates on a serverless model. It instantly scales up or down based on demand, dramatically cutting operational overhead and lowering total ownership costs.
- Lakehouse Integration: Seamless integration with the lakehouse paradigm means operational and analytical workloads coexist effortlessly. This reduces the need for complex ETL pipelines and unifies data governance and security for streamlined management.
- Modern Development Workflows: Borrowing from software development best practices, Lakebase enables full database branching. Developers can clone entire databases, including both schema and data, for testing, experimentation, and rapid iteration, enhancing agility and reducing deployment risks.
- AI-Ready Architecture: With instant provisioning, elastic scaling, and support for massive parallelism, Lakebase is uniquely equipped for environments where AI agents are primary users. This architecture supports rapid experimentation at significantly lower costs.
Lakebase is built on Neon technology, which provides copy-on-write branching and autoscaling serverless compute. Copy-on-write branching makes it possible to instantly create a new database with the same data and schema as an existing database, without affecting the original.
This new database is economically friendly because it does not duplicate the underlying data. Serverless compute autoscaling provides for sub-second start times, and scales based on demand, with scaling to zero allowing for cost-effective compute utilization.
Combined, serverless autoscaling of compute and branching capabilities completely change the development paradigm for applications. Read more
Why Lakebase Is Needed Now
Traditional operational databases have become a bottleneck for organizations seeking to unify analytics, AI, and real-time operations. Their monolithic design often leads to high costs and slow adaptation, requiring manual integrations that add complexity and risk. Lakebase’s open, modular, and serverless architecture enables data teams to move at business speed while laying a solid groundwork for AI-driven innovation.
Lakebase in Real-World Practice
- Instant Scalability: Lakebase automatically adjusts to workload changes, keeping applications performing smoothly without manual tuning.
- Real-Time Data Access: Deep integration with lakehouse technology ensures operational data is always ready for analytics and AI, supporting immediate insights and rapid decision-making.
- Empowering AI Agents: Lakebase anticipates a future where AI agents are the primary database users, delivering the speed, isolation, and affordable experimentation these systems require.
Shaping the Future of Operational Data
Lakebase is more than just a technology, it’s a shift in how operational databases are conceived and managed. By prioritizing openness, elasticity, and AI readiness, Lakebase sets a new benchmark for unified, intelligent applications. For organizations aiming to future-proof their data infrastructure, adopting Lakebase’s principles will be essential for staying ahead in an AI-driven world.
DataBricks Lakebase: The Evolution in Operational Databases for an AI-Driven World