Cloud data platforms now offer hundreds of services, plus a growing menu of SQL, NoSQL, and open source options. Unified environments promise a simpler path, but the hard trade-offs—consistency versus scale, single-writer versus sharded, RPO/RTO targets—still matter. In daily work, you may be deciding between SQL Server, Postgres, and a globally distributed JSON store, while also asking AI tools to draft queries and spot issues. Should you still learn SQL if an agent can write it? How do you validate the intent, performance, and security of generated queries? And can monitoring agents actually reduce on-call pain without taking away needed control?

Shireesh is the CVP of Databases at Microsoft. He leads product management, engineering, and cloud operations for Azure Databases as well as App Development for Microsoft Fabric. The products in his team’s portfolio include Azure SQL Database (on-prem, Hybrid and Cloud), Azure Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL, and Azure MySQL.\\n\\n

Previously, as the Senior Vice President at SingleStore, Shireesh was responsible for end-to-end engineering and product vision of the company. Before moving to SingleStore, Shireesh was a founding member of Cosmos DB, where he architected, designed, and directly contributed to multiple key pieces of the services.\\n\\n

Shireesh has 20+ years of experience on large scale, big data, scale-out, relational and schema agnostic distributed systems across SQL, Azure Cosmos DB and PostgreSQL/Citus.

In the episode, Richie and Shireesh explore how AI agents are reshaping data stacks, why unified platforms like Fabric matter, how semantic models and ontologies reduce confusion in metrics, SQL and NoSQL choices on Azure, Postgres to Cosmos DB with guidance for builders, and much more.

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#355 AI's Impact on Databases with Shireesh Thota, CVP of Databases at Microsoft