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

Databricks, a data and AI company, today announced the launch of Lakebase, a first-of-its-kind fully managed Postgres database designed for AI. SAN FRANCISCO, June 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Data + AI Summit 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.
Every application relies on operational databases (OLTP), a market worth more than $100 billion. However, they are expensive, difficult to manage, and susceptible to vendor lock-in because they are based on decades-old architecture designed for slowly changing apps. 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. In order to reduce latency between AI systems and provide businesses with current information to make decisions in real time, operational and analytical systems must also converge. With continuous autoscaling of compute to support agent workloads, the new Lakebase, powered by Neon technology, brings operational data to the lakehouse (which stores data in low-cost lakes) 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. “With Lakebase, we are now creating a new category in the database market: a contemporary Postgres database that is tightly integrated with the lakehouse and current 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 As AI agents reshape how businesses operate, Fortune 500 companies are ready to replace outdated systems.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. In addition, Lakebase's unique branching capability makes low-risk development possible by generating copy-on-write database clones that support agent-based development and developer testing. 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. Lakebase is completely managed by Databricks. It is based on hardened compute infrastructure and encrypted data at rest. It supports point-in-time recovery, high availability, and integrates with network security and compliance features of Databricks enterprise features. 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.
“Being the brewery with the most connections is our goal at Heineken. 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. Anjan Kundavaram, Chief Product Officer at Fivetran, stated, “Our customers can focus on building applications instead of worrying about provisioning, tuning, and scaling.” “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.
Ecosystem of Partners 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 from within their Databricks workspace, or they can read more on this page.