Gemini in Databases — supercharge database development and management

Yesterday, at Next ‘24, we announced a preview of Gemini in Databases — an AI powered database assistant that simplifies all aspects of database operations including assisted development, performance optimization, fleet management, governance, and migrations. With Gemini in Databases, companies no longer need to exclusively rely on people with specialized skills and custom resources to manage their databases — Google's proactive AI assistant can help!

In most organizations, developers, database administrators, and platform engineers handle various aspects of database development and management. However, with the proliferation of databases to meet growing data processing demands, these experts are often overwhelmed by a myriad of database requirements, operational issues, and inefficiencies. Furthermore, with the rapid evolution in database technologies, developers are finding it hard to stay up-to-date with the latest development techniques, hampering both development quality and productivity. At the same time, “a majority (79%) of IT teams are now using more than one database platform, with 29% of respondents using more than five, and across a wide range of categories, IT professionals cite a lack of skills, knowledge gaps and a rapid need to upgrade and diversify their abilities at every level”.¹ Between developer productivity challenges, performance regressions, security and compliance vulnerability, and data migration difficulties, 82% of developers spend 30 minutes each day searching for solutions, according to a Stack Overflow survey.²

Gemini in Databases delivers an AI-powered assistant that helps across all stages of the database journey without development and operations teams needing to acquire specialized skills. With Database Studio, developers can build and deploy applications faster with the ability to generate, and summarize SQL code from simple natural language instructions. With Database Insights, operators can easily optimize performance by leveraging the insights and smart recommendations from the AI-powered assistant. With Database Center, platform engineers can manage entire fleets of diverse databases using the intelligent dashboards built with AI, proactively assessing availability, data protection, security, and compliance issues without any custom tools or processes. Finally, with Database Migration Service, database administrators can streamline and expedite their database migrations with automated code and database conversions. With Gemini in Databases, database professionals get all of these capabilities in a single offering supported by both visual and natural language interfaces, enabling them to simplify and de-risk database management. 

“As we are journeying into digital transformation, we are concerned about maintaining our pace of development due to the growing complexity of database environments that power our applications,” said Bogdan Capatina, Technical Expert in Database Technologies, Ford Motor Company. “We manage thousands of databases across hundreds of projects, which makes it extremely challenging to optimize performance and ensure security. Gemini in Databases is a game changer, bringing the power of assistive AI across the database journey. Now, we can get answers on fleet health in seconds instead of days and act on performance and security recommendations to proactively mitigate potential risks to our applications more swiftly than ever before.”

Accelerate application development 

With the increased focus on digital transformation and modernization of data platforms, developers who now frequently also perform the DevOps role are dealing with the increased burden to not only build, manage, and future-proof architectures, but also develop applications at a faster clip. 

Database Studio empowers developers to easily write and understand SQL with intelligent code assistance, code completion, and guidance directly in the editor. Developers can utilize the context-aware chat interface with natural language to build database applications faster using the SQL suggestions provided by the AI assistant. These assistive features can easily boost developer productivity especially in cases where developers are unfamiliar with a particular database dialect or are looking to optimize existing code for better performance and efficiency.

Stay ahead of performance issues 

Database Insights empowers operators to address their database performance issues through an easy-to-use interface, providing visibility into all database metrics in a single view, saving time and enhancing productivity. 

Database Insights makes resolving complex database problems easier by providing in-context explainability for nuanced database concepts such as wait events, database flags, and various database metrics available for troubleshooting. It automatically analyzes your workloads, highlights problems, and provides recommendations to resolve them. It also looks for common problems like missing indexes, incorrect flags, and resource bottlenecks, among other key performance configurations, to help operators optimize queries and tune their databases.

With richer, near-real-time diagnostics, operators can easily detect and troubleshoot their query performance issues. This powerful yet simple experience allows them to correlate query metrics across a multitude of dimensions and identify the root cause of previously hard-to-diagnose problems.

De-risk and optimize your database fleet

With the new Database Center, platform engineers now have a single pane of glass into their entire database fleet, regardless of the number of instances or types of database engines. This new dashboard provides a central view on database performance, security, cost and availability to proactively monitor and identify instances that need attention.

Managing fleets of databases can be complex and time-consuming. However, with the integrated AI assistant in Database Center, database teams can  interface with the system using natural language, making it easier to find the information they need and troubleshoot problems. Teams can ask ad-hoc questions regarding their database health and get tailored responses, enhancing productivity. In addition, Database Center monitors critical signals to highlight potential performance issues, using predictive analytics to alert when resources will be saturated. It also scans for common database flag misconfigurations and provides best practices to build the best version of their database.Database Center can also automatically analyze your instance usage patterns to provide right-sizing recommendations tailored for your workload, preventing over-provisioning that wastes resources or under-provisioning that compromises performance and availability. Furthermore, the AI assistant looks for idle instances and seasonal usage patterns to suggest shutdown and start policies during non-operational hours. Database Center delivers simplified security configuration through automated scans, providing recommendations to mitigate risks and promote industry-standard best practices. By integrating with Security Command Center, Database Center empowers teams with near-instant analysis of security findings and potential attack vectors, keeping them proactively shielded against adversaries.

Streamline and expedite database migrations

Performing database migrations require a lot of expertise, and understanding database schemas along with their dependencies in application code can be tedious. To save time and resources, Database Migration Service (DMS) makes it easier to lift and shift databases to Cloud SQL and modernize legacy databases to a cloud-optimized database such as AlloyDB. With Gemini in DMS, developers and administrators can now easily assess and convert database-resident code such as stored procedures, triggers, and functions, to the PostgreSQL dialect. Our AI capabilities also help with last-mile code conversion by learning from the user’s initial conversions. Furthermore, our AI-powered explainability feature in DMS helps developers to easily learn new PostgreSQL dialects, optimize SQL code, and enhance readability for better productivity, easier migrations, and higher efficiency.

How to get started

We are excited to share that the new capabilities of Gemini in Databases are available in preview today. To learn more, visit https://cloud.google.com/products/gemini/databases

<sup>1.  The State of the Database Landscape, Redgate, 2024
2. Professional Developer Productivity Impact Survey, StackOverflow, 2022</sup>