The database is at the core of data analytics and artificial intelligence in modern computing. But companies working on AI projects are finding traditional databases aren’t up to snuff. It turns out, the perfect potion to juice up databases for the AI age might very well be AI.

This is the thinking behind IBM Corp.’s latest database announcements, unveiled at this week’s IBM Think conference.

“We think it’s disrupting 40 years of database technology,” said Matthias Funke (pictured), executive director of hybrid data management offering at IBM. The cost-based optimizer in databases has not changed over that whole period, he added.

“The way people combine their queries, execute their query plans on data, has been the same for 40 years,” he explained. “[Today] we’ll be talking about a new method to do that. It has tremendous gains in terms of performance, in terms of simplicity for the users.”

Funke spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed IBM’s upcoming announcements and the role of the database in AI. (* Disclosure below.)

Automated database for all

Any kinks or speed bumps in the database-gathering process are the enemy of AI, according to Funke. Bringing intelligence into the database make the lives of the database administrators and other users easier.

“The DBA plays a core role in making sure that the data is available, especially in traditional on-premises environments, but also in the private cloud,” he said. “Often that role is now delegated to the public cloud provider … [or] managed database services. But still, their job is to make sure the data is available, that queries perform in an efficient way, and the business can depend on those data sets being available.”

IBM’s automation technology reduces the amount of labor and skills required to operate a database, he added.

Also, IBM’s latest technology brings different workload types together in a single copy of data. This is one way to reduce latency and high cost that may come with complex data architectures.

IBM will reveal more details about their database announcements today at IBM Think.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE