With data stored and processed in databases expected to double by 2025, many organizations are reevaluating their backend infrastructure in order to reduce costs, extend agility, and improve performance at scale. "As data volumes continue to scale, we've found that customer needs have also shifted," said Research Analyst Alexander Wurm. "Now customers evaluate a wider range of capabilities in competitive deals, and vendors compete to deliver elastic scalability, serverless compute, integrated data governance, and in-database analytics to capture emerging adoption." To address emerging customer needs, leading vendors are investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to extend governance and automate administrative tasks such as performance tuning and resource provisioning. Leaders in this year's Value Matrix deliver advanced functionality without sacrificing ease-of-use at scale.