Hi everyone! This is an update to my recent blog post on the final days of the legacy data warehouse (link below).

The topic of legacy data warehouses slowly fading away struck a chord with many readers. Now we have updates from Snowflake and Teradata.

On Aug 24, the same day I published “The Final Days of the Legacy Data Warehouse,” Snowflake announced its earnings for Q2 FY2023. Not surprisingly, a question about legacy systems came up during Snowflake’s earnings call. One financial analyst asked Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman about the level of activity of customers migrating from on-premises systems to Snowflake’s data cloud.

Slootman: “In the last week, I've heard two very, very iconic names in two different industries that were staunch on-premises people, who would never ever go cloud, and that are now going [cloud]. So I just feel that the resistance is completely breaking….A lot of this is that they’re going to get left behind. You can’t take advantage of innovations that are only available on the cloud. We’re going to see acceleration out of this.”

Is he right? I have no doubt that he is.

According to Ocient, 59% of respondents to its survey are actively looking to switch data warehouse providers. They specifically named IBM, Cloudera, and Teradata as the top 3 legacy environments that data managers want to move away from.

Their reasons:

· 40% want to modernize their legacy platforms

· 42% feel their existing system isn’t comprehensive enough, and

· 36% say it’s not flexible enough

This explains why Snowflake, with its data cloud and data marketplace, has become such a tour de force. Other disruptors are Databricks, Firebolt, SingleStore, TileDB, Yellowbrick, and of course AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

I would include Ocient as well, with its hyperscale data warehouse platform, which is capable of analyzing trillions of records.

The old guard responds

Where does that leave traditional data warehouse providers—companies like IBM and Teradata? They know that their customers want newer, cloud-native platforms. And they’re taking steps to modernize their offerings.

That brings me back to Teradata, which recently made a product announcement that is relevant to this whole discussion.

Teradata is synonymous with the older data warehouses that many organizations are looking to replace. But Teradata is fighting back, as SVP Ashish Yajnik described to me in an earlier Cloud Database Report podcast conversation (link below).

Teradata’s new cloud-native architecture

Now, Teradata has just introduced VantageCloud Lake, a new and improved cloud data warehouse that is based on a cloud-native architecture. With modern capabilities like object storage in the cloud, auto scaling, and self-service in AWS, and soon to be available in other clouds.

So the decision to move to a cloud data warehouse is getting easier, but also harder in some respects.

* Easier because that’s the inevitable direction the industry is heading. For CIOs and CTOs the question is when, not if.

* Harder because incumbent vendors like Teradata are not standing by while Snowflake and Databricks pick off their installed base. They’re responding with cloud-native platforms of their own.

Who will be the next leaders in this fast-changing market? We’ll have to wait a while longer for the query results on that question.

Has the database market attempted to solve data complexity — only to create even more complexity?

That’s the argument of Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, who thinks he has the answer to the plethora of databases found in many of today’s IT environments: one database that can handle operational data, analytics, and many different data types in a single, unified platform.

It’s not a new idea — the database industry went down the path of “universal databases” back in the 1990’s (i.e. Illustra, Informix) — and SingleStore isn’t the only vendor with an all-purpose DBMS. But the company is establishing its database as a viable solution among the many that are out there. For that reason, I added SingleStore to the Cloud Database Report’s Top 20 list earlier this year (see below).

You may remember SingleStore by its former name, MemSQL. The company was rebranded in 2020, and has been growing, expanding, and building its database for modern applications.

On the latest episode of the Cloud Database Report podcast, I talked to CEO Raj Verma about the rebranding of SingleStore, multi-model databases, the competitive landscape — and Verma’s ambitious goal of being on the short list of preferred database providers for large organizations.

“We feel that enterprises will spend 95% of their database dollars on probably three companies in the future,” Verma says. “And we want to be one of them.”

Recent moves

* SingleStore has hired two Microsoft veterans to lead engineering and product development. Shireesh Thota joins as SVP of engineering to oversee development of the company’s multi-model SQL database. And Yatharth Gupta head ups product management/design as VP of product management.

* In an expanded partnership, IBM has agreed to license and support the SingleStore database. SingleStore was already available via IBM’s Cloud Pak for Data and in the Red Hat Marketplace. IBM has also become an investor in SingleStore.

* Last September, SingleStore announced $80 million in Series F funding. Investors include Dell, HPE, and Google Ventures, among others.

As you can see, SingleStore is associating itself with some of the biggest names in enterprise tech. While that doesn’t assure success, it certainly lends credibility to its unified database proposition and strategic direction.

All of which serves as the backdrop for my conversation with Raj Verma.

Key topics from the interview include:

* The rebranding of SingleStore

* How 'Database 3.0' is different from earlier eras

* What is data intensity?

* All-purpose databases vs. purpose-built DBMS's

* What organizations can do to simplify database sprawl

* Rethinking the post-pandemic workplace

* What’s next for SingleStore

Quotes from the podcast:

* “Our mission is very simple. It is to unify and simplify modern data.”

* “The volume, variety, and velocity of data just inundated enterprise organizations.”

* “We feel the future will belong to a database that can combine a vast majority of workloads in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment.”

* “The personality of data is ever evolving.”

* “The shelf life of data is going down dramatically, and the volume is increasingly. So without speed, you're going to be done — you know what I mean?”

* “This convergence of databases is a foregone conclusion, in my opinion....I am fairly confident that there will be a massive consolidation in the database space.”

This audio article was originally published by the Cloud Database Report on March 2, 2022.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant has long served as a proof point of a vendor’s relevance in its respective market. But what about those that don’t make it into the quadrant? Here are my observations about six key players—DataStax, Micro Focus, MongoDB, Neo4j, Yellowbrick Data, and Yugabyte—that were not included in Gartner’s Cloud Database MQ for 2021.

You can listen here, or read the full story below.