Google Cloud Fleshes Out Its Databases At Next 2025, With An Eye To AI
BigDATAwire, Thursday, April 10th, 2025
Google Cloud unveiled a major round of database enhancements at its Next 2025 conference, including a host of new AI features in AlloyDB, a MongoDB-compliant API for Firestore, continuous materialized views in BigTable, MCP connections galore, new database migration services, and the introduction of Oracle Exadata in its cloud.
When it comes to AI, Google Cloud is seeing a considerable amount of momentum in AlloyDB, its Postgres-flavored relational database service. It adopted the open source pgvector extension for Postgres in mid 2023, allowing AlloyDB customers to store vector embeddings directly in their database and query them using the extension's approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) algorithm.
In April 2024, Google Cloud added the internally developed Scalable Nearest Neighbor (ScaNN) algorithm to AlloyDB, giving its database an immediate 8x performance boost in creating vector indexes, a 4x boost in serving vector queries, and a 10x boost in write throughput, according to its April 2024 white paper.