Modern applications live in the cloud and access and generate large amounts of data, requiring a modern data infrastructure that can scale seamlessly as user numbers grow. Data-intensive applications use various types of data, including user data, 3rd party data, telemetry data, and aggregate data, to provide insights and drive business decisions. These applications require a consistent, highly available, durable, and resilient data infrastructure that can handle the volume, velocity, and variety of data. The modern approach to data infrastructure emphasizes scalability, security, privacy, and semantic understanding of data, with a focus on delivering real-time and instant access to users. To meet these needs, modern applications often rely on specialized database systems that support natively loading data from various formats and delivering analytics without noticeable lag.