Xin: Single HTAP database engines compromise ecosystem compatibility and performance
Reynold Xin · The Agent Cloud: Databricks’ Bet on the Future of AI — Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin · Jun 24, 2026 · at 32:30
Databricks co-founder Reynold Xin discusses why historical attempts at Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) fail to replace dedicated OLTP and OLAP systems.
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“This is sort of the holy grail of database engineering is, why not build a single system that can do both of this? But it ends up just being a lot of compromises. And one, I think one of the first issue is that, hey, each, they say Postgres has a massive ecosystem, right? You want to be using the tools that's built for Postgres. And Spark, for example, had a massive ecosystem. There's a lot of libraries you want to use. If you were to create now a new thing, you don't have an ecosystem. You tend to create a new, smaller proprietary API, and you're lacking both. And it's also very difficult to make it performance-wise to be sort of comparable. On either side. So it ends up being actually sucking on both.”
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