This is light on specifics, but is still directionally the closest anyone has come to describing my ideal future data platform. The founder Dan Sotolongo's work at Snowflake included Dynamic Tables which makes me think the proposal is basically this: a hybrid transactional/analytical database, with declarative domain-oriented schemas, with smart incrementally calculated updates, and a la carte performance characteristics (i.e. opt into row or columnar storage, or whatever indexing you like). Nathan Marz's Rama is also close to this vision but perhaps a little less accessible for many enterprises as it's more purely developer focused. The win here is that you have a single system with all your data, all the time, and can build on it however you like. Piecing complex new services together across multiple microservices is deeply painful - if you can give me a single smart platform for all my data, and make it work operationally, that feels like a big win.

Obviously a lot of this you can piece together today, in fact Snowflake itself does a lot of it. But the other part of the article makes me think they understand the even harder part of the problem in modern enterprises, which is that nobody has a clear view of the model they're operating under, and how it interacts with parts of the business. It takes insane foresight and discipline to keep these things coherent, and the moment you are trying to integrate new acquisitions with different models you're in a world of pain. If you can create a layer to make all of this explicit - the models, the responsibilities, the interactions, and the incompatibilities that may already exist, then mediate the chaos with some sort of AI handholding layer (because domain experts and disciplined engineers aren't always going to be around to resolve ambiguities), then you can solve both a huge technical problem but a much more complicated ecological one.

Anyway, whatever they're working on, I think this is the exact area you should focus on if you want to transform modern enterprise data stacks. Throwing AI at existing heterogenous systems and complex tech stacks might work, but building from scratch on a system that enforces cohesion while maintaining agility feels like it's going to win out in the end. Excited to see what they come up with!