Databases are no longer just storing data. They are being asked to reason over it. And most enterprises are not ready for what that means.In this season opener of Stratola Spectrum, Dinesh Chandrasekhar sits down with Shireesh Thota, Corporate Vice President, Databases at Microsoft, to unpack –

✅How AI is fundamentally rewiring database architecture.

✅The real story behind how OpenAI scaled Postgres to 800 million ChatGPT users.

✅Why RBAC is not built for autonomous agents.

✅What Microsoft is building next with Azure Horizon DB and Fabric.

This is one of the most technically grounded conversations on the future of enterprise data infrastructure you will find. No hype, just clarity.

🎙️ Guest: Shireesh Thota, Corporate Vice President, Databases, Microsoft

🎙️ Host: Dinesh Chandrasekhar, Chief Analyst and Founder, Stratola

📌 Chapters are timestamped below. Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of Data, AI and the enterprise.

🔗 Learn more about Stratola: https://www.stratola.com

🔗 Connect with Shireesh Thota: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shireeshthota/

🔗 Connect with Dinesh Chandrasekhar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dineshc/

#Databases #AgenticAI #VectorDatabase #MicrosoftAzure #DataArchitecture #CloudDatabase #EnterpriseAI #AI #MSFabric #CosmosDB #AzureDB

Timestamps –

00:11 — Introduction : Dinesh sets up why databases are one of the most important and underrated battlegrounds in the AI era today.

00:41 — Meet Shireesh Thota, Microsoft : Corporate Vice President leading all operational databases at Microsoft including SQL Server, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, MySQL and Postgres.

02:04 — From Exact Lookups to Semantic Search : How AI has fundamentally changed the way data is queried and retrieved, and why vector search alone is still not the full answer.

06:08 — From Systems of Record to Systems of Reasoning : The biggest philosophical shift in database architecture today and what it demands from how data is stored and structured.

10:53 — Is SQL Actually Dead : The debate that refuses to go away gets a proper answer, and where natural language fits alongside SQL in the world of copilots and agents.

16:30 — How OpenAI Scaled Postgres to 800 Million Users : The real architecture behind ChatGPT, the engineering innovations Microsoft built to make it work, and the birth of Azure Horizon DB.

23:39 — Unifying the Entire Data Stack with Microsoft Fabric : Why the future is not more databases but one unified data estate, and how Fabric is Microsoft's long term bet to make that happen.

29:21 — Databases as the Memory Layer for AI Agents : The four types of agent memory explained and why every operational database is already a vector database.

36:10 — Rethinking Security and Governance for Agentic AI : Why traditional RBAC was never built for autonomous agents and what the next generation of access control actually needs to look like.

45:45 — Five Years from Now : What Should Microsoft Get Right: Shireesh closes with a grounded and honest vision for where databases need to be in a world where developers barely need to think about them anymore.