Databases

AWS released ExtendDB v0.1 on May 20, an Apache 2.0 adapter implementing the DynamoDB wire protocol on pluggable backends including PostgreSQL and Apache Cassandra, targeting local dev, CI/CD, on-premises, and hybrid environments.

Google announced a downloadable edition of Cloud Spanner that runs on-premises, on rival clouds, or on a laptop, dismantling a dependency on proprietary infrastructure that its engineers once thought impossible to remove.

ClickHouse 26.5 arrives on May 21 with 38 new features, 51 performance optimizations, a 27x Merge table speedup, Iceberg V3 geometry support, and new SQL compatibility aliases for PostgreSQL, Snowflake, and BigQuery.

Amazon Aurora Serverless platform version 4 scales 45% faster and delivers up to 30% better throughput at no extra cost, targeting agentic AI workloads.

SIG-etcd has released the first beta of etcd 3.7.0, introducing streaming reads for large result sets, up to 2x faster lease operations, and the complete elimination of all v2 API code.

Apache Iceberg 1.11.0 arrives with at-rest encryption across all table files, Spark 4.1 and Flink 2.1 compatibility, and Deletion Vector write support for Flink.

Etsy has finished migrating its proprietary 1,000-shard MySQL infrastructure to Vitess after five years, 2,500 pull requests, and 6,000 query rewrites, eliminating a single point of failure while preserving its existing data layout through custom vindexes.

Databricks has made Lakebase generally available on Azure across 14 regions, completing a multi-cloud rollout of its serverless PostgreSQL database built on technology from its Neon and Mooncake Labs acquisitions.

The third Iceberg Summit in San Francisco brought 70+ sessions and announcements from Snowflake, Google, Dremio, Databricks, and AWS as the open table format's V3 specification reaches production readiness.

A three-part Netflix Tech Blog series and subsequent InfoQ coverage reveal how the streaming company built a custom graph platform atop Apache Cassandra and EVCache, bypassing traditional graph databases to serve social graphs, service topology, and real-time distributed graphs at internet scale.

DuckDB 1.5.0 introduces a VARIANT type that speeds JSON queries up to 100x, promotes GEOMETRY into core, overhauls the CLI, and delivers broad performance gains across more than 6,500 commits from nearly 100 contributors.

Oracle ends security patches for MySQL 8.0 on April 30, leaving 58 percent of monitored instances on an unsupported version with no fix path for new vulnerabilities.