Yugabyte Releases Distributed Database Trends Report, Unveils Vision for Database Modernization for Scalable and Resilient AI Applications

Yugabyte Inc., a player in distributed database, announced the findings of its independent Distributed Database Trends Report and its vision for agentic database modernization.

Released during the company’s annual Distributed SQL Summit on November 10, co-hosted at KubeCon North America, the new report reveals enterprise priorities and challenges for database modernization and next-gen application development.

The report, created in collaboration with Gatepoint Research, surveyed senior technology leaders, including CIOs, CTOs and VPs of Engineering and Architecture across financial services, healthcare, technology, and manufacturing. The results reveal a strong focus on innovation and modernization, both at the application layer and the data layer, with developing next-gen applications, including AI-based apps, topping organizational priorities at 76%, followed by application modernization at 63%.

However, legacy databases present a significant roadblock to these modernization efforts. Respondents cite inefficient operations and slow innovation (50%), limited scalability (43%), high costs (36%), and resilience issues (30%) as the biggest challenges with legacy databases.

To overcome these challenges, nearly half (48%) of enterprises are re-architecting for cloud-native or distributed databases, while 45% are migrating to fully managed cloud databases. In addition, when evaluating modern database solutions, HA and resilience (71%) and scalability (69%) emerge as the most critical attributes, followed by enterprise-grade security (60%).

“These findings signal that tech leaders are making a decisive move toward modernization, underscoring the need for informed architectural choices that not only support AI strategy but also ultra-resilience,” said Karthik Ranganathan, co-founder and co-CEO, Yugabyte. “To support the move from legacy databases to highly resilient and seamlessly scalable distributed databases, we are offering AI agents to power migrations and AI-powered Performance Advisor for ongoing monitoring and tuning. These findings validate our investments to create cutting-edge tools to support enterprises in their modernization journey.”

While the most popular technology investment is generative AI (80%), enterprises are also exploring and evaluating agentic AI (58%), Large Action Models (42%) and RAG technologies (40%). These investments align with application modernization strategies and also highlight the growing demand for multi-modal capabilities at the data layer that support and integrate with modern technologies.

For the full research, download the full Distributed Database Trends report here.