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Reynold Xin

Cofounder and Chief Architect, Databricks

Search every verified Reynold Xin interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Reynold Xin, cofounder and chief architect at Databricks, has been discussing the company's recent product announcements and his views on the future of data infrastructure. At the Data + AI Summit in June 2026, Xin introduced Lakehouse//RT, a real-time analytics engine powered by a new compute engine called Reyden. He demonstrated Reyden executing 8,000 queries at 6,000 queries per second with a tail latency of 37 milliseconds, and said that "none of existing systems can do this." Xin also described Lakebase branching, a copy-on-write clone of an entire database that he said can be created in under a second and costs roughly a penny before being thrown away. He argued that traditional databases "inhibit innovation" because they are slow and expensive to provision, and that infrastructure should enable "rapid experimentation at scale cheaply." Xin has also discussed the impact of AI agents on database architecture. He stated that "agents are becoming the actual primary persona" for database usage, and that "99% of psycho value engineers these days don't write code manually and don't provision the database manually." He described Databricks' work on LTAP (lake transactional and analytical processing), which aims to unify transactional and analytical databases, and Omnigent, an open-source meta-harness for combining different coding agents. Xin said that "many of the traditional software will be sort of rewritten with this new paradigm, which is just get the data to be there and then let's slap some AGI on top."

Recent appearances

  • Spin Up a Whole Production Database for 1 Cent | Reynold Xin, Databricks

    July 16, 2026 · 📺 DataCamp

    Cloning a production database has always been slow, expensive, and risky enough to take production down. In this clip, Databricks co-founder and Chief Architect Reynold Xin (co-creator of Apache Spark) breaks down Lakebase branching: a copy-on-write clone of your entire database in under a second, that auto-scales to zero, runs your whole CI/CD pipeline on every pull request, and costs roughly a penny before it's thrown away. It's a genuinely new way to build — ephemeral databases that don't exist until you need them, with perfect isolation from production. 🎧 Watch the full episode of DataF…

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  • Databricks Co-Founder: "CDC = Continuous Data Corruption"

    July 15, 2026 · 📺 DataCamp

    For 40 years, databases have been split into two worlds — transactional and analytical — and the brittle pipelines shuttling data between them are why data engineers get paged at 3am. In this clip, Databricks co-founder and Chief Architect Reynold Xin (co-creator of Apache Spark) explains why he jokes that CDC doesn't stand for "change data capture" but "continuous data corruption," and how Databricks' new LTAP approach makes every transactional table show up in the lakehouse in Iceberg format — always fresh, with no pipeline to build. 🎧 Watch the full episode of DataFramed:    • AI Agents…

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  • AI Agents Are Now Your Database's Main User | Reynold Xin, Co-Founder at Databricks

    July 13, 2026 · 📺 DataCamp

    For forty years, the rule held that transactional and analytical databases had to be separate systems, connected by fragile pipelines that move data from one to the other. That assumption is now being questioned. As AI agents start generating the majority of database activity, the old architecture is being redesigned around speed, scale, and a single copy of governed data. For anyone who works with data day to day, this raises practical questions. Do you still need separate systems for live and historical data? What happens to the pipelines you maintain? And how does your stack change when age…

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  • The Data Frontier: from Spark to Agent Clouds — Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin of Databricks

    June 24, 2026 · 📺 Latent Space

    From open-sourcing the layer above coding agents to rethinking databases for the agent era, Databricks cofounders Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin are pushing the company beyond the lakehouse into a full data-and-AI operating system. In this episode, Matei and Reynold join swyx after Data + AI Summit to unpack Omnigent, LTAP, Lakebase, agent security, open formats, Mosaic, and why databases may matter more than ever once AI agents start doing real work. We go deep on Omnigent: Databricks’ open-source meta-harness for combining, controlling, and sharing agents across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, P…

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  • AI 에이전트가 엔지니어 조직을 뒤집는다 | Reynold Xin (Databricks), YC

    June 24, 2026 · 📺 스쿱 (Scoop)

    Databricks 공동창업자 겸 수석 아키텍트 Reynold Xin이 YC 매니징 파트너 Diana Hu와 나눈 대담. AI 코딩 에이전트가 엔지니어링 조직 구조와 인프라 설계를 어떻게 근본적으로 바꾸는지 이야기합니다. 핵심 내용 전통적 엔지니어링 조직은 매니저, 시니어, 그리고 수많은 주니어로 이뤄진 피라미드였다 AI 에이전트가 코딩과 일부 설계 작업까지 맡으면서 조직이 'I자 형태'의 톱헤비 구조로 바뀐다 무엇을 어떻게 만들지 아는 사람만 남고, 단순 노동은 에이전트가 완전히 자동화한다 증기기관에서 전기모터로 넘어간 공장 비유: 단순 교체는 점진적 개선뿐, 재설계가 진짜 도약을 만든다 기존 거대 시스템에 AI를 덧붙이기보다, AI 네이티브한 새 팀과 제품 라인을 만드는 게 더 쉽다 Databricks가 인수한 Neon은 서버리스 Postgres로, 1년도 안 돼 매출이 10배 넘게 성장했다 에이전트 시대의 인프라는 거의 0에 가까운 비용으로 시작해 필요할 때 확장되는 경량 구조여야 한다 발표자: Reynold Xin - Databricks 공동창업자 겸 수석 아키텍트 진행: Diana Hu - Y Combinator 매니징 파트너 원본: YC Roo…

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  • Introducing Lakehouse//RT and Reyden — Reynold Xin, Co–founder and Chief Architect

    June 23, 2026 · 📺 Databricks

    Introducing Lakehouse//RT: The real-time Lakehouse powered by Reyden Lakehouse//RT delivers real-time analytics directly on governed Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg™ data. Underpinned by Reyden, a new compute engine designed for agentic enterprises, Lakehouse//RT lets companies achieve millisecond performance without setting up separate serving systems. Learn more about Lakehouse//RT: https://www.databricks.com/company/ne... 00:00 — The limitations of legacy data warehouses 02:07 — Challenges to a building a single database engine 05:31 — Introducing Reyden with live demo 08:21 — Reyden's…

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  • Databricks Lakehouse Reyden Engine (Databricks Summit 2026)

    June 17, 2026 · 📺 Debashis Paul

    For downstream analytical serving, Lakehouse//RT shatters the legacy scale-latency tradeoff. Powered by the vectorized Reyden engine, it delivers sub-second, millisecond-level response times for high-concurrency workloads directly on your data lake, creating an ultra-fast foundation that integrates seamlessly with operational dashboards and Power BI. Lakehouse//RT ran more than a third faster on average than our prior warehouse on our healthcare dataset, with 10× faster queries. That translates directly to quicker information access and more decision time for our customers. We had considered…

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  • The Value of Datatabricks' Lakeflow, Lakebase, and More - w/⁨ @Databricks Cofounder, Reynold Xin

    January 16, 2026 · 📺 Josue Bogran Channel

    Reynold Xin, cofounder ‪@Databricks‬ joined me to discuss the value of some of Databricks' most popular features. Chapters 00:00 Simplifying data engineering with Lakeflow 01:43 OLTP meets OLAP with Lakebase 02:47 License-free dashboards with AI/BI Dashboards 05:16 Open-source data sharing with Delta Sharing 07:23 Unified data estate with Unity Catalog If you enjoyed this video, hit subscribe here on Youtube. Want to connect? Reach out on LinkedIn at   / josuebogran   Thank you for watching!

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  • Databricks Lakebase (OLTP) Technical Deep Dive Chat + Demo w/ @Databricks Cofounder, Reynold Xin

    December 01, 2025 · 📺 Josue Bogran Channel

    Reynold Xin, cofounder @Databricks shows us a demo of Lakebase with all of the newly upgraded capabilities from the Neon ...

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  • Databricks Data+AI Summit 2025 Keynote | Co-founder Reynold Xin and Neon Co-founder Nikita Shamgunov

    June 13, 2025 · 📺 Techusiness

    Nikita Shamgunov's presentation at the Data+AI Summit 2025 highlighted the transformative role of AI in database management, ...

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  • Databricks Data+AI Summit 2025 Keynote | Databricks Cofounder Reynold Xin

    June 12, 2025 · 📺 Techusiness

    Reynold Xin, co-founder and Chief Architect of Databricks, delivered a keynote at the Data+AI Summit 2025, held from June 9 to ...

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  • Introducing Lakebase - Databricks Co-founder & Chief Architect Reynold Xin

    June 12, 2025 · 📺 Databricks

    Introducing Lakebase, the first fully-managed, multi-cloud, Postgres-compatible transactional database engine designed for ...

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“AIBI is our take on BI — it's actually free, because we think we can monetize enough below that level so we don't have to charge user‑based or seat‑based pricing.”

“If we can provision and acquire compute resources in hundreds of milliseconds, we can scale the database itself entirely down to zero so you don't pay for it when there's no traffic; that ability to autoscale to zero and back in sub-second time changes the paradigm for both agents and human operators.”

“We actually didn't know about this until the Neon acquisition — eighty percent of the databases on Neon were created or managed by AI agents; a year ago that number was 30%, so it went from 30% to like 80%. If you extrapolate that line, at some point 99% of the databases will be created by AI agents.”

“If they only care about compute and storage, they will eventually become commodities and their profit margins will be very low.”

“For cloud providers, what they care about most is compute and storage; although Amazon or Microsoft have many different services, they still care about compute and storage the most.”

Other executives at Databricks

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