Speaker: Stas Kelvich
Location: Soda Hall, 510
Date: Friday, March 6th, 2026
Time: 12-1 pm PT
Title: Lakebase: Agent-Native OLTP
Abstract:
Over 80% of OLTP workloads on Databricks are now provisioned and managed by AI agents, giving rise to a new class of agentic database workloads. This emerging class of workloads presents new challenges and priorities for database system design. In this talk, we characterize these real-world agentic OLTP workloads and high- light how they differ fundamentally from classic OLTP workloads. We then introduce Lakebase, a new database architecture that not only transforms PostgreSQL, a 35-year-old open-source database system, into an agentic database engine, but also establishes a new category of databases that OLTP systems are converging toward. Databricks Lakebase is built on the data lake, a novel storage layer that leverages cloud object stores, open formats, and disaggre- gated compute. This design enables capabilities that are traditionally difficult to realize in OLTP systems, including instant provisioning, elastic scaling (up and down to zero), instantaneous branching, hy- brid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP), and large-scale fleet management.
Speaker Bio:
Stas Kelvich is co-founder of Neon and principal engineer at Databricks.