Another year passes. I was hoping to write more articles instead of just these end-of-the-year screeds, but I almost died in the spring semester, and it sucked up my time. Nevertheless, I will go through what I think are the major trends and happenings in databases over the last year.
There were many exciting and unprecedented developments in the world of databases. Vibe coding entered the vernacular. The Wu-Tang Clan announced their time capsule project. Rather than raising one massive funding round this year instead of going public, Databricks raised two massive rounds instead of going public.
Meanwhile, other events were expected and less surprising. Redis Ltd. switched their license back one year after their rugpull (I called this shot last year). SurrealDB reported great benchmark numbers because they weren't flushing writes to disk and lost data. And Coldplay can break up your marriage. Astronomer did make some pretty good lemonade on that last one though.
With that out of the way, let's do this. These articles are getting longer each year, so I apologize in advance.
Previous entries:
The Dominance of PostgreSQL Continues
I first wrote about how PostgreSQL was eating the database world in 2021. That trend continues unabated as most of the most interesting developments in the database world are happening once again with PostgreSQL. The DBMS's latest version (v18) dropped in November 2025. The most prominent feature is the new asynchronous I/O storage subsystem, which will finally put PostgreSQL on the path to dropping its reliance on the OS page cache. It also added support for skip scans; queries can still use multi-key B+Tree indexes even if they are missing the leading keys (i.e., prefix). There are some additional improvements to the query optimizer (e.g., removing superfluous self-joins).
Savvy database connoisseurs will be quick to point out that these are not groundbreaking features and that other DBMSs have had them for years. PostgreSQL is the only major DBMS still relying on the OS page cache. And Oracle has supported skip scans since 2002 (v9i)! You may wonder, therefore, why I am claiming that the hottest action in databases for 2025 happened with PostgreSQL?
The reason is that most of the database energy and activity is going into PostgreSQL companies, offerings, projects, and derivative systems.
Acquisitions + Releases:
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