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Top Database Management Trends, Challenges, and Breakthroughs for 2025: How Vendors Are Shaping the Path to Agentic AI

Publisher IDC
Published Mar 24, 2026
Length 12 Pages
SKU # IDC21046740

Description

This IDC Market Perspective summarizes the most notable database supplier initiatives completed in 2025 and explains how they collectively signal a shift from databases for AI experiments to databases for AI execution. Across the market in 2025, vendors expanded integrated vector search and hybrid retrieval, advanced converged access to real-time operational and analytical context, strengthened hybrid cloud and multicloud operating models, introduced early agent-aware tooling inside database platforms, and increased emphasis on automation and production-grade controls. Taken together, these moves reflect a market prioritizing predictable retrieval, lower data movement, and safer database-assisted actions as organizations push agentic AI into operational workflows."Last year, 2025, marked a point in which database innovation pivoted from adding AI features to operationalizing AI outcomes. Suppliers that make retrieval predictable, context continuous, and AI-assisted actions controllable inside the database management system (DBMS) will set the pace for agentic AI at scale," says Devin Pratt, research director, IDC

Table of Contents

12 Pages

Executive snapshot

Key takeaways

Recommended actions

New market developments and dynamics

Introduction

Industry Dynamics

Integrated vector search becomes the baseline approach for enterprise AI retrieval

Converged workloads provide continuous context for real-time agents

Hybrid cloud and multicloud deployment becomes the operational baseline

Autonomous operations and agent-safe controls have moved into core DBMS road maps

Open table formats and catalog interoperability become strategic for database buyers

Adoption barriers and supplier implications for agentic AI on databases

Risk remains the top constraint

Data readiness determines speed to production

AI workloads increase cost and capacity volatility

Production agents raise reliability expectations

Operating model and skills gaps slow progress

Vendor Examples

Acquisitions and consolidation

Market strategies

Scenarios/use cases

IDC's Point of View

Advice for the technology supplier

Learn more

Related research

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