Feature Stores need an HTAP Database

A Feature Store is a collection of organized and curated features used for training and serving Machine Learning models. Keeping them up to date, serving feature vectors, and creating training data sets requires a combination of transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) database processing. This kind of mixed workload database is called HTAP for hybrid transactional analytical processing. The most useful Feature Stores incorporate data pipelines that continuously keep their features up to date through either batch or real-time processing that matches the cadence of the source data. Since these features are always up to date, they provide an ideal source of feature vectors used for inferencing.