Postgres-based cloud database startup Tembo emerged from stealth today to address database sprawl and challenge the big tech companies offering nominally open-source Postgres database services — think Oracle, Snowflake or Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Founder and CEO Ry Walker told SDxCentral that large database-managed service providers, "Oracle in particular," have been cashing in on the developer trend of "using the most specialized database for every application need," he said. These robust suites of specialized database management tools "lock developers onto their platform, and then [providers] sell other specialized database managed services to their captured customers."

This array of tools also creates database sprawl, which unnecessarily complicates the jobs of data engineers and scientists. Given that most organizations can't hire experts in multiple database systems, Walker says he founded Tembo to provide a better alternative by making it easier "for developers to build application-optimized databases on a single platform."

Tembo CTO Samay Sharma told SDxCentral that while most proprietary database providers are offering nominally open-source database management systems like Postgres, these offerings "aren't fully open source." Restrictions on Postgres extensibility and platform-specific idiosyncrasies, for example, make it harder to move data from one provider to another.

"We give developers full access to the open-source version of Postgres and its open-source ecosystem," Sharma said. "This includes Postgres extensions and other ecosystem tools around Postgres." In turn, developers "can easily migrate their database to self-managed Postgres or other Postgres providers as all the building blocks of our solutions are open source."

Tembo has also open-sourced its Kubernetes operator and data plane, and "people can use this for their needs on their own terms," Sharma said.

Walker cited a recent discussion with a nonprofit seeking an affordable alternative to Snowflake's managed database services. "The platform had grown far too expensive for the organization's needs," he said. "Their leadership was interested in migrating to pure Postgres, but they were also concerned that using Postgres would require a depth of expertise that their engineers didn’t have."

The nonprofit can reduce costs by migrating from Snowflake to Postgres, and Tembo builds use-case-optimized databases without requiring extensive expertise in Postgres.

"We hear stories like this all the time," Walker said. "Developers and software companies are tired of the cost and complexity that come with using database management systems from big tech companies that lock them onto their platform."

Tembo's launch represents a push toward database-first development and away from application-first development — where databases are an afterthought.

Rather than picturing the database as an application sidecar, developers should first pick the right database for the application's current and future needs. With Postgres, developers can modify a database based on evolving application needs via extensions rather than migrating to a different database entirely. "In this sense, Postgres saves developers a significant amount of time and effort without sacrificing performance or the ability to handle new application needs," Sharma said.

An "everything database" like Postgres is incredibly versatile — an important characteristic as artificial intelligence (AI) workloads continue to grow. Efficient processing and analysis of app data is at the heart of AI applications, but developers can't swiftly iterate on AI apps if they're locked into specialized databases "that are challenging to optimize, deploy and migrate," Sharma said. "Having access to various different sources of data is pretty important in having context for AI, so being able to join all these different sources in a single database like Postgres is very powerful and removes the cost, complexity and optimization challenges that are a significant drag on building, deploying and managing data-intensive AI applications," he said.

Tembo, which translates from Swahili to elephant (the Postgres project's mascot), plans to use its $6.5 million in seed funding from Venrock, Fireroad, CincyTech and Wireframe Ventures to "allow all developers to unlock the full power of Postgres and its ecosystem," Sharma said.