Announcement
Responsive is joining Databricks
We’re excited to announce that Responsive is joining Databricks to accelerate development of Lakebase and Neon. In this next chapter, we’ll help advance a new category of online database built on object storage that is especially powerful for modern AI and agent-driven workloads, where developers want to launch many instances, experiment freely, and pay only for what they use.
Building a new generation of databases
We created Responsive with the goal of making database technology more affordable while simultaneously improving scalability and reliability. We had a few technical insights:
- Disaggregating storage and compute eliminates much of the cost and complexity that have historically defined databases
- Globally addressable state that lives on object storage (the data lake) in an open format makes it possible to run different compute engines on the same underlying storage (e.g. transactional, search, and analytical)
- Instant checkpoints, branches and clones enable both agents and developers to run cheap experiments without taking down their production systems
Over the last four years, we’ve pursued that vision. That led us to be founding members of the SlateDB project, an OSS embedded LSM engine backed by object storage, and OpenData, a suite of online databases that are built on SlateDB.
Joining Lakebase
Databricks’ announcement of Lakebase came shortly after we launched OpenData, and we remember reading it and feeling validated: Each of our insights was echoed in that post.
When the opportunity came to join forces with Databricks, it was immediately clear that this was the best path to make our vision a reality. Lakebase shares the architectural principles behind our work at Responsive, with Postgres providing a familiar starting point and Databricks bringing the reach and trust to put that architecture into wider use.
The Responsive acquisition will likewise accelerate the Lakebase vision. While Postgres is the universal starting point, Lakebase goes far beyond that with LTAP (Lakebase Transactional/Analytical Processing), Lakebase Search, and other offerings. Our technology and expertise building database engines on a unified substrate will help bring Lakebase into its next phase.
Thanks for all the stars
We want to wrap up by thanking the community that helped make all of our systems successful. In particular, the SlateDB project would not be what it is without the thriving open source community, and the project will remain governed independently by the Commonhaus foundation.
We’re proud of what we’ve built, and we look forward to continuing the work that started Responsive at Databricks: building better database systems.
— Apurva, Almog & Rohan