List of the Top 9 Database Software for Unity Catalog in 2025

BigQuery is a highly adaptable and robust database solution designed to efficiently manage both structured and semi-structured data at large volumes, making it ideal for diverse applications. It utilizes standard SQL for querying, which facilitates seamless integration with current workflows and tools. Being a fully managed service, it alleviates the burdens of database maintenance, allowing organizations to concentrate on gaining insights instead of dealing with infrastructure management. New users can take advantage of $300 in complimentary credits to explore BigQuery’s functionalities, giving them the opportunity to experiment with both operational and analytical queries to assess its effectiveness for their data storage and access requirements. Additionally, BigQuery is equipped with strong security measures, ensuring the protection of sensitive information, even when dealing with large datasets.

Google Cloud Platform provides a range of managed database options, such as Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, and Cloud Firestore, tailored to meet diverse application requirements. These services streamline database administration while ensuring high levels of availability, scalability, and security. New users receive $300 in free credits to experiment with, test, and deploy their workloads, giving them the opportunity to investigate GCP's database offerings and determine how these managed solutions can satisfy their data storage and querying needs. GCP's database services are seamlessly integrated with other offerings like BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage, facilitating efficient data analytics processes. Furthermore, organizations can select from both relational and NoSQL databases, enabling them to find the most suitable option for their unique scenarios. The platform’s automated scaling and management capabilities help minimize operational burdens, allowing companies to concentrate on their applications instead of managing infrastructure.

Snowflake is a leading AI Data Cloud platform designed to help organizations harness the full potential of their data by breaking down silos and streamlining data management with unmatched scale and simplicity. The platform’s interoperable storage capability offers near-infinite access to data across multiple clouds and regions, enabling seamless collaboration and analytics. Snowflake’s elastic compute engine ensures top-tier performance for diverse workloads, automatically scaling to meet demand and optimize costs. Cortex AI, Snowflake’s integrated AI service, provides enterprises secure access to industry-leading large language models and conversational AI capabilities to accelerate data-driven decision making. Snowflake’s comprehensive cloud services automate infrastructure management, helping businesses reduce operational complexity and improve reliability. Snowgrid extends data and app connectivity globally across regions and clouds with consistent security and governance. The Horizon Catalog is a powerful governance tool that ensures compliance, privacy, and controlled access to data assets. Snowflake Marketplace facilitates easy discovery and collaboration by connecting customers to vital data and applications within the AI Data Cloud ecosystem. Trusted by more than 11,000 customers globally, including leading brands across healthcare, finance, retail, and media, Snowflake drives innovation and competitive advantage. Their extensive developer resources, training, and community support empower organizations to build, deploy, and scale AI and data applications securely and efficiently.

Azure Synapse is the evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse, offering a robust analytics platform that merges enterprise data warehousing with Big Data capabilities. It allows users to query data flexibly, utilizing either serverless or provisioned resources on a grand scale. By fusing these two areas, Azure Synapse creates a unified experience for ingesting, preparing, managing, and delivering data, addressing both immediate business intelligence needs and machine learning applications. This cutting-edge service improves accessibility to data while simplifying the analytics workflow for businesses. Furthermore, it empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions more efficiently than ever before.

Trino is an exceptionally swift query engine engineered for remarkable performance. This high-efficiency, distributed SQL query engine is specifically designed for big data analytics, allowing users to explore their extensive data landscapes. Built for peak efficiency, Trino shines in low-latency analytics and is widely adopted by some of the biggest companies worldwide to execute queries on exabyte-scale data lakes and massive data warehouses. It supports various use cases, such as interactive ad-hoc analytics, long-running batch queries that can extend for hours, and high-throughput applications that demand quick sub-second query responses. Complying with ANSI SQL standards, Trino is compatible with well-known business intelligence tools like R, Tableau, Power BI, and Superset. Additionally, it enables users to query data directly from diverse sources, including Hadoop, S3, Cassandra, and MySQL, thereby removing the burdensome, slow, and error-prone processes related to data copying. This feature allows users to efficiently access and analyze data from different systems within a single query. Consequently, Trino's flexibility and power position it as an invaluable tool in the current data-driven era, driving innovation and efficiency across industries.

Azure SQL Database, a key component of the Azure SQL suite, serves as a flexible and advanced relational database service tailored for cloud usage. This service benefits from ongoing improvements, integrating AI-driven functionalities that significantly enhance its performance and dependability. With features like serverless computing and Hyperscale storage, resources can dynamically scale based on demand, freeing developers to focus on crafting cutting-edge applications without the burden of managing storage constraints or resource distribution. The challenges of ensuring high availability, fine-tuning performance, handling backups, and carrying out various database operations are all addressed by this fully managed SQL service. It accelerates application development on a system that offers continuous SQL capabilities, meaning users are never encumbered by the necessity for updates, upgrades, or worries about the end of support. Furthermore, developers are granted the freedom to build modern applications in a way that aligns with their specific needs by utilizing both provisioned and serverless computing options. This adaptability enables rapid innovation and responsiveness in a fast-changing technological environment, fostering a culture of creativity and efficiency among development teams. Ultimately, Azure SQL Database stands as a robust solution for organizations seeking to leverage cloud-based technologies effectively.

LanceDB is a user-friendly, open-source database tailored specifically for artificial intelligence development. It boasts features like hyperscalable vector search and advanced retrieval capabilities designed for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), as well as the ability to handle streaming training data and perform interactive analyses on large AI datasets, positioning it as a robust foundation for AI applications. The installation process is remarkably quick, allowing for seamless integration with existing data and AI workflows. Functioning as an embedded database—similar to SQLite or DuckDB—LanceDB facilitates native object storage integration, enabling deployment in diverse environments and efficient scaling down when not in use. Whether used for rapid prototyping or extensive production needs, LanceDB delivers outstanding speed for search, analytics, and training with multimodal AI data. Moreover, several leading AI companies have efficiently indexed a vast array of vectors and large quantities of text, images, and videos at a cost significantly lower than that of other vector databases. In addition to basic embedding capabilities, LanceDB offers advanced features for filtering, selection, and streaming training data directly from object storage, maximizing GPU performance for superior results. This adaptability not only enhances its utility but also positions LanceDB as a formidable asset in the fast-changing domain of artificial intelligence, catering to the needs of various developers and researchers alike.

Starburst enables organizations to strengthen their decision-making processes by granting quick access to all their data without the complications associated with transferring or duplicating it. As businesses gather extensive data, their analysis teams frequently experience delays due to waiting for access to necessary information for evaluations. By allowing teams to connect directly to data at its origin, Starburst guarantees they can swiftly and accurately analyze larger datasets without the complications of data movement. The Starburst Enterprise version offers a comprehensive, enterprise-level solution built on the open-source Trino (previously known as Presto® SQL), which comes with full support and is rigorously tested for production environments. This offering not only enhances performance and security but also streamlines the deployment, connection, and management of a Trino setup. By facilitating connections to any data source—whether located on-premises, in the cloud, or within a hybrid cloud framework—Starburst empowers teams to use their favored analytics tools while effortlessly accessing data from diverse locations. This groundbreaking strategy significantly accelerates the time it takes to derive insights, which is crucial for businesses striving to remain competitive in a data-centric landscape. Furthermore, with the constant evolution of data needs, Starburst adapts to provide ongoing support and innovation, ensuring that organizations can continuously optimize their data strategies.

Managing and storing tabular data, like that in CSV or Parquet formats, is crucial for effective data management practices. It's often necessary to transfer large sets of results to clients, particularly in expansive client-server architectures tailored for centralized enterprise data warehousing solutions. The task of writing to a single database while accommodating multiple concurrent processes also introduces various challenges that need to be addressed. DuckDB functions as a relational database management system (RDBMS), designed specifically to manage data structured in relational formats. In this setup, a relation is understood as a table, which is defined by a named collection of rows. Each row within a table is organized with a consistent set of named columns, where each column is assigned a particular data type to ensure uniformity. Moreover, tables are systematically categorized within schemas, and an entire database consists of a series of these schemas, allowing for structured interaction with the stored data. This organized framework not only bolsters the integrity of the data but also streamlines the process of querying and reporting across various datasets, ultimately improving data accessibility for users and applications alike.