Q2 2025: A Monster Quarter

With Q2 ending in a whirlwind, we’re unleashing a monster: our biggest research drop ever covering Databricks, Google, IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Snowflake.

Agents headlined. But up there was Data for AI: It needs the right data & the lakehouse is emerging as the nexus for analytics & AI.

Now let’s dive in.

Data reclaimed the spotlight at Databricks, which unveiled its agentic dev framework last year. The headline was acquisition of Neon, a PostgreSQL database, leading to release of v1 of Lakebase. Databricks terms this as “a new category of database” but as to what that is... we'll see. Databricks is also trying to spread its appeal with a new "Easy Button" for the rest of us; how convincing is its move?
https://www.dbinsight.io/form-databricks-wants-the-easy-button

We covered a couple key developments with Google. Opening up its 2025 NEXT conference in The Sphere in Las Vegas showing off the reimagining The Wizard of Oz for the humungous screen, Google’s GenAI message could be summed up as ”We’re back!”
https://www.dbinsight.io/form-laying-the-foundations-for-agentic-ai-google-next-2025-trip-report

Google also unveiled its Gen2 Apache Iceberg expanding access from BigQuery to Alloy DB, Dataproc & serverless Spark. And like AWS, Google has some underlying storage optimizations up its sleeve. So what difference will this make for customers, and what's right path to the lakehouse?
https://www.dbinsight.io/form-google-fleshes-out-biglake

IBM broadened agentic & lakehouse portfolios. Its agentic focus is connecting to enterprise systems & for the lakehouse, IBM is adding data fabric & integration features; could this collapse the Modern Data Stack. And with the acquisition of HashiCorp now closed, could IBM become cool with developers again?
https://www.dbinsight.io/ibm-broadens-the-watsonxdata-portfolio

Oracle came in a couple times. Oracle Database@AWS is now live. What’s Oracle’s multicloud presence going to look like a year from? And how can it sustain this aggressive rollout pace?
https://www.dbinsight.io/form-oracle-databaseaws-goes-live

Oracle made hybrid news introducing Nvidia GPUs for Cloud@Customer. Could bringing GPUs home break the bottleneck to customer access? And what types of models will be realistic there?
https://www.dbinsight.io/form-oracle-compute-cloudcustomer-brings-gen-ai-onpremises-copy

SAP is making Joule agents its de facto interface. That begs the question in the enterprise apps world. If you believe Satya Nadella, agents will replace apps. Not surprisingly, SAP has another take. Spoiler alert? It’s About Data.
https://www.dbinsight.io/form-databricks-wants-the-easy-button-cop

Product dev came back at Snowflake. With a new CEO in town, they unveiled the first major platform upgrade with Gen2 & Adaptive Warehouses; does this sound like Oracle Exadata? And with Crispy Data, can they finally make Unistore reality?
https://www.dbinsight.io/form-at-snowflake-product-development-is-back