The Three Golden Ages of Database Engineering: From SIGMOD’85 to the Agentic Era

Summary: Traces three database-engineering golden ages, from relational systems through lakehouses to agentic workloads. Introduces Lakebase and LTAP: storage/compute separation for OLTP and analytics, avoiding HTAP’s co-location trade-offs. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Aug 28 2026)

Paper ID: ha27590ab1e617f97
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2026
Pagerank: -
Overall Rank: 13,614 | 8.47%
DOI: 10.14778/3827998.3838713

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Reynold Xin (Databricks)

BibTeX Citation

@article{xin_vldb26,
        title = {{The Three Golden Ages of Database Engineering: From SIGMOD’85 to the Agentic Era}},
        author = {Xin, Reynold},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '26},
        volume = {19},
        number = {12},
        pages = {4981--4981},
        doi = {10.14778/3827998.3838713},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3827998.3838713},
        year = {2026}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	14,222	Trends in Data Warehousing: A Practitioner's View	2004	VLDB
2	14,124	Trends in High Performance Analytics	2006	SIGMOD
3	5,348	Adaptive and Robust Query Execution for Lakehouses at Scale	2024	VLDB
4	14,014	Is It Still "Big Data" If It Fits In My Pocket?	2011	VLDB
5	11,034	Data Agents: Rethinking Data Systems in the AI Agent Era	2026	VLDB
6	13,849	The Data Center under your Desk – How Disruptive is Modern Hardware for DB System Design?	2017	VLDB
7	13,863	Trends and Challenges in Big Data Processing	2016	VLDB
8	13,793	The Challenge of Building Effective Data Lakes	2020	SIGMOD
9	10,943	Lakebase: Serverless Postgres over Open Lake Storage	2026	VLDB
10	9,352	Bringing the Operational and Analytical Worlds Together with Lakebase	2025	VLDB