Databricks Launches Lakebase: a New Class of Operational Database for AI Apps and Agents

Cision Canada

4 days ago

Fully-managed, Postgres database built to unify analytics and operations for intelligent
apps
SAN FRANCISCO, June 11, 2025 /CNW/ -- Data + AI Summit-- Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced the launch of Lakebase, a first-of-its-kind fully-managed Postgres database built for AI. With Lakebase, Databricks adds an operational database layer to the company's Data Intelligence Platform. Now, developers and enterprises can build data applications and AI agents faster and more easily on a single multi-cloud platform. Lakebase is now available in Public Preview.
Operational databases (OLTP) are a $100-billion-plus market that underpin every application. However, they are based on decades-old architecture designed for slowly changing apps, making them difficult to manage, expensive and prone to vendor lock-in. AI is introducing a new set of requirements. Now, every data application, agent, recommendation and automated workflow needs fast, reliable data at the speed and scale of AI agents. This also requires that operational and analytical systems converge to reduce latency between AI systems and to provide enterprises with current information to make real-time decisions. The new Lakebase, powered by Neon technology, brings operational data to the lakehouse (storing data in low-cost lakes) with continuous autoscaling of compute to support agent workloads and unifies operational and analytical data. Now developers can build faster, scale effortlessly and deliver the next generation of intelligent applications.
"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," said Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO of Databricks. "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. As AI agents reshape how businesses operate, Fortune 500 companies are ready to replace outdated systems. With Lakebase, we're giving them a database built for the demands of the AI era."
Lakebase: The Operational Database for the AI Era
Lakebase is designed for the next era of application development and is intended to enable developers and AI agents. Key benefits of Lakebase include:
Separated compute and storage: Lakebase is built on Neon technology, with separated compute and storage for independent scaling. Its cloud-native architecture supports low latency (<10 ms), high concurrency (>10K QPS) and high availability transactional needs.
Built on open source: Postgres is widely used by developers and has seen rapid adoption over the last few years. The familiar, open source engine has a rich ecosystem of community extensions and partners and is ideal for workflows built on agents, as all frontier LLMs have been trained on the vast amount of information on the database system.
Built for AI: Launch in under a second, and only pay for what you use. Additionally, Lakebase's unique branching capability enables low-risk development by creating copy-on-write database clones to assist both developer testing and agent-based development.
Integrated with the lakehouse. Automatically sync data to and from lakehouse tables. Lakebase also provides an online feature store for model serving and is integrated with Databricks Apps and Unity Catalog.
Enterprise ready. Fully managed by Databricks, Lakebase is based on hardened compute infrastructure and encrypted data at rest, supports high availability, point-in-time recovery and integrates with Databricks enterprise features from network security to compliance.
Lakebase Momentum
Digital leaders are already seeing the value of unifying operational and analytical workloads on a single platform, with hundreds of enterprises already in the Private Preview. Lakebase can be used across industries to serve personalized product recommendations, create shopping experiences powered by agents, manage clinical trial workflows and more.
"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. Databricks has long been our foundation for analytics, creating insights such as product recommendations and supply chain enhancements. Our analytical data platform is now evolving to be an operational AI data platform and needs to deliver those insights to applications at low latency." — Jelle Van Etten, Head of Global Data Platform at Heineken.
"Lakebase removes the operational burden of managing transactional databases. Our customers can focus on building applications instead of worrying about provisioning, tuning and scaling." — Anjan Kundavaram, Chief Product Officer at Fivetran.
"Our research shows that the data and insights from analytical processes are the most critical data to enterprises' success. In order to act on that information, they must be able to incorporate it into operational processes via their business applications. These two worlds are no longer separate. 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. This combination will help enterprises maximize the value they derive across their entire data estate — from storage to AI-enabled application deployment." — David Menninger, Executive Director, ISG Software Research.
Partner Ecosystem
A strong partner network helps Lakebase customers work with their System Integrators and use existing enterprise tools for data integration, business intelligence, and governance. We're excited to have the following launch partners on board: Accenture, Airbyte, Alation, Anomalo, Atlan, Boomi, Cdata, Celebal Technologies, Cloudflare, Collibra, Confluent, Dataiku, dbt Labs, Deloitte, EPAM, Fivetran, Hightouch, Immuta, Informatica, Lovable, Monte Carlo, Omni, Posit, Qlik, Redis, Retool, Sigma, Snowplow, Spotfire, Striim, Superblocks, ThoughtSpot and Tredence.
Availability
Lakebase is available in Public Preview starting today, with additional, significant improvements planned over the coming months. Customers can enable the preview directly from their Databricks workspace or visit this page to learn more.
About Databricks
Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 15,000 organizations worldwide — including Block, Comcast, Condé Nast, Rivian, Shell and over 60% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to take control of their data and put it to work with AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, MLflow, and Unity Catalog. To learn more, follow Databricks on X, LinkedIn and Facebook.