The Influence of Artificial Intelligence on Database Systems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the landscape of database systems, with its influence permeating operational and service-delivery aspects. This transformation is a symbiotic one. On the one hand, AI is being leveraged to enhance database performance, facilitating autonomous and semi-autonomous operations and data service delivery. On the other hand, databases are integral to AI and Machine Learning (ML), as they manage and supply high-quality, reliable data when needed.

Leveraging AI for Enhanced Database Performance

Artificial intelegence and machine learning technologies hold the potential to improve the performance of various types of databases. They can be utilized for tasks such as discovering, processing, and searching datasets, delivering quick results. As Thomas Davenport and Thomas Redman noted in the MIT Sloan Management Review, AI is subtly enhancing data management, including aspects like data quality, accessibility, and security. They further elaborate that managing data is a labour-intensive activity that involves cleaning, extracting, integrating, cataloguing, labelling, and organizing data, among other tasks.

Today’s data managers are challenged to provide improved data capabilities within limited or relatively static budgets. With organizations sourcing and ingesting more data than ever before, often in the multiterabyte and gigabyte range, this data must be readily available to business users, data scientists, and mission-critical applications. AI is revolutionizing the way databases operate today, autonomously improving database query development and performance and managing databases’ daily operation, provisioning, and security.

Emerging methodologies that incorporate AI in database management include AIOps, which applies AI to streamline and automate data operations; DataOps, which involves the application of intelligent collaboration and automation to data pipelines; and DataSecOps, which pertains to data security operations on cloud-native databases.

Applying AI to database functions will enable data engineers, architects, administrators, and scientists to focus on more significant tasks beyond routine maintenance. These tasks include digital transformation and innovation, crucial for thriving in today’s highly competitive environment.

The Role of Databases in AI Development

Databases are indispensable to AI development. AI’s success hinges on the availability of meaningful and relevant data, making a well-managed database the bedrock of AI. The quality of AI models and algorithms is directly proportional to the quality of data they are fed. Organizations rely on databases operating at optimal performance to supply timely and pertinent data for training datasets and large language models.

In the future, enterprises and data managers must pinpoint the data crucial for training models and address potential data shortages for maintaining these models. The data fuelling AI systems must be current and relevant to business issues, often in real-time. Moreover, this data must be of the highest quality and trustworthiness.

Data utilized by ML models is often “raw” or unstructured, necessitating content delivery networks as part of a high-performance data architecture. While simple time-series data can be accumulated and stored in a database, training using audio or image data often exceeds the capabilities of databases. A content delivery network—comprising interconnected servers that cache such assets close to applications or end users—may be more appropriate in such cases.

Databases supporting AI initiatives must also manage a broad spectrum of data types, from structured to unstructured. Distributed SQL databases with Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) capabilities meet this requirement, delivering real-time analytical data of all types when and where needed.

The Value Addition of Generative AI

Generative AI—offered by platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, or Microsoft’s Bing Chat—can potentially revolutionize various aspects of the database world. Operationally, generative AI can generate code for applications or scripts that boost database performance and integration. This allows database developers, architects, engineers, and administrators to undertake higher-level tasks and respond more swiftly to business needs.

Generative AI can also aid in database configuration and assist in designing a high-performance data architecture, leveraging patterns and experiences stored locally or across the network.

From a service-delivery perspective, modern databases will be tasked with preserving the data used within large language models for enterprise-specific instances of generative AI. This data offers recommendations to database teams and across the broader business.

The Evolution of SQL Development in the Age of AI Innovation

The emergence of AI has significantly broadened the capabilities of databases and the roles of those working with them. AI enables the automatic construction of simple SQL queries through natural language processing prompts, minimizing or eliminating the need for coding. An AI-driven SQL interface can also suggest questions based on an analysis of the backend database.

Generative AI, for example, has much to offer for ad hoc or natural language queries created by non-technical users. For programmers, AI has shown proficiency in generating syntactically correct windowing functions, which are often tedious to develop and beyond the skillset of most business users. Machine Learning (ML) techniques can generate simple queries for non-experts, which can be easily verified to produce accurate results. AI has already demonstrated its ability to comprehend natural language queries that aid programming on MySQL, making it a preferred protocol due to the abundance of training data. AI can understand schema and apply best practices for SQL. However, AI needs to effectively distinguish between transaction and analysis types of queries or maintain cross-sharding consistency. This necessitates an AI assistant programming approach that leverages a more versatile, user-friendly, and flexible database.

The emerging architectural approach supports the delivery of real-time insights and capabilities, leveraging AI. Databases are becoming the backbone of real-time AI, used with streaming technologies.

AI introduces new methods for building and managing databases and elevates the databases’ roles. Enterprises need to prepare for and harness AI’s power with scalable, scalable data architectures capable of processing mixed workloads, highly available, and able to deliver intelligence on demand.