The cloud is built on abstraction, standardisation, and scale. It works because most workloads can be made to look the same.
Databases are the exception. Their performance characteristics, failure modes, and architectural constraints are deeply tied to how they are built and deployed.
As AI increases the pressure on data systems, the tension between cloud uniformity and database specificity becomes more visible.
For two decades, DBAs protected production databases from analytics workloads. AI agents have ended that truce and the consequences go deeper than most realise.
AI agents bypass dashboards and query databases directly. This article explains what that means for the architecture of enterprise data systems and systems of record.
Databases were designed for human-paced interaction – sessions, think time and deliberate intent. AI agents remove all three assumptions simultaneously.
AI inferencing is a database problem disguised as an AI problem. Real-time model workloads expose latency and concurrency demands that enterprise storage wasn’t designed for.
Hyperscalers have solved cloud infrastructure for most workloads. High-performance RDBMS remains the exception – the gap between cloud promises and database reality is still real.
Not all cloud vCPUs are equal. This article explains how constrained and optimised CPU configurations affect enterprise database performance in ways the spec sheet doesn’t reveal.
On-premises databases were overprovisioned for performance. Cloud databases are overprovisioned for a different reason: unpredictable pricing. This article explains the real cost.
AWS, Azure and GCP are competing hard for enterprise databases. This article explains why mission-critical RDBMS workloads are the prize and what that means for DBAs.
The public cloud is like a hotel – flexible and convenient but shared infrastructure. This article explains what that model really means for enterprise databases.
Gartner predicted 75% of databases in the cloud by 2022. The industry debate focused on migration – but not on the question that mattered most: what happens to performance?
flashdba 