AI scale has no time for Postgres bottlenecks

The survey conducted by Cockroach Labs and Wakefield Research highlights the challenges faced by traditional databases such as PostgreSQL in handling AI workloads, revealing that databases often become the first point of failure due to their design for a different era of computing. AI workloads introduce machine-generated concurrency and demand global availability, exposing the limits of vertical scaling and active-passive architectures. Cisco's AI team, originally Armorblox, encountered these challenges as their customer base grew, leading them to transition from PostgreSQL to CockroachDB, which offered distributed SQL designed for horizontal growth and multi-region active-active deployment. This shift allowed Cisco to focus on enhancing AI capabilities without being hindered by database-related issues. The transition underscores a broader industry need for databases that support AI's complex and concurrent demands, emphasizing horizontal scaling, strong consistency, and minimal operational overhead to keep pace with AI advancements.