Evidence receipt / recommendation
Published · transcript-backedSimon Hørup Eskildsen: recommendation
12 Mar 2026 Latent Space Retrieval After RAG: Hybrid Search, Agents, and Database Design — Simon Hørup Eskildsen of Turbopuffer
“I think the third thing you need to do to build a big database company is that over time you have to implement more or less every Cory plan on the data.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Simon Hørup Eskildsen
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- recommendation
- Recorded
- 12 Mar 2026
- Publisher
- Latent Space
Transcript context
…The way that I generally think about this is like, there’s a lot of database companies and I think if you wanna build a really big database company, sort of, you need a couple of ingredients to be in the air. We don’t, which only happens roughly every 15 years. You need a new workload. You basically need the ambition that every single company on earth is gonna have data in your database. Multiple times you look at a company like Oracle, right? You will, like, I don’t think you can find a company on earth with a digital presence that it not, doesn’t somehow have some data in an Oracle database. Right? And I think at this point, that’s also true for Snowflake and Databricks, right? 15 years later it’s, or even more than that, there’s not a company on earth that doesn’t, in. Or directly is consuming Snowflake or, or Databricks or any of the big analytics databases. Um, and I think we’re in that kind of moment now, right? I don’t think you’re gonna find a company over the next few years that doesn’t directly or indirectly, um, have all their data available for, for search and connect it to ai. So you need that new workload, like you need something to be happening where there’s a new workload that causes that to happen, and that new workload is connecting very large amounts of data to ai. The second thing you need. The second condition to build a big database company is that you need some new underlying change in the storage architecture that is not possible from the databases that have come before you. If you look at Snowflake and Databricks, right, commoditized, like massive fleet of HDDs, like that was not possible in it. It just wasn’t in the air in the nineties, right? So you just didn’t, we just didn’t build these systems. S3 and and and so on was not around. And I think the architecture that is now possible that wasn’t possible 15 years ago is to go all in on NVME SSDs. It requires a particular type of architecture for the database that. It’s difficult to retrofit onto the databases that are already there, including the ones you just mentioned. The second thing is to go all in on OIC storage, more so than we could have done 15 years ago. Like we don’t have a consensus layer, we don’t really have anything. In fact, you could turn off all the servers that Turbo Buffer has, and we would not lose any data because we have all completely all in on OIC storage. And this means that our architecture is just so simple. So that’s the second condition, right? First being a new workload. That means that every company on earth, either indirectly or directly, is using your database. Second being, there’s some new storage architecture. That means that the, the companies that have come before you can do what you’re doing. I think the third thing you need to do to build a big database company is that over time you have to implement more or less every Cory plan on the data. What that means is that you. what you’re doing. I think the third thing you need to do to build a big database company is that over time you have to implement more or less every Cory plan on the data. What that means is that you. You can’t just get stuck in, like, this is the one thing that a database does. It has to be ever evolving because when someone has data in the database, they over time expect to be able to ask it more or less every question. So you have to do that to get the storage architecture to the limit of what, what it’s capable of. Those are the three conditions. I just wanted to get a little bit of like the motivation, right? Like, so you left Shopify, you’re like principal, engineer, infra guy. Um, you also head of kernel labs, uh, inside of Shopify, right? And then you consulted for read wise and that it kind of gave you that, that idea. I just wanted you to tell that story. Um, maybe I, you’ve told it before, but, uh, just introduce the, the. People to like the, the new workload, the sort of aha moment for turbo Puffer…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.