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Home » Blogs » Exasol 8 Release 2025.2: Unleashing Context-Rich AI and Personal Big Data Analytics for All

Exasol 8 Release 2025.2: Unleashing Context-Rich AI and Personal Big Data Analytics for All

Florian Wenzel
· · 9 mins read

Accelerating Innovation, Expanding Possibilities

Building on the foundations of Exasol Release 2025.1, we now take the next leap with Exasol 8 Release 2025.2: unleashing context-rich AI, personal big data analytics for everyone, and even greater speed. Every feature in 2025.2 is designed to amplify what you loved about 2025.1, making analytics more open, interoperable, and accessible, while pushing performance to new heights. Read on to discover how Exasol is shaping the future of data, and how you can be part of it.

What’s New at a Glance

Looking Back: Exasol 8 Release 2025.1 Laying the Groundwork for Next-Level Analytics

At the beginning of last year, Exasol 8 Release 2025.1 set a new benchmark for enterprise analytics, introducing core innovations that made AI-native capabilities and cloud agility accessible to every data team. With in-database language models, text-ai, and GPU-accelerated UDFs, we empowered users to run advanced AI and machine learning workloads directly where their data lives, securely, and at scale. The revamped Admin UI made platform management smoother, while new features like worker cluster session offloading and automated action scheduling brought smarter elasticity and automation to our SaaS offering.

Performance upgrades, including faster query compilation, nanosecond timestamps, and dramatic improvements to bulk data loading enabled users to tackle larger, more complex workloads with ease. And with expanded ecosystem integration (think rapid Parquet ingestion, virtual schemas for Databricks and Snowflake), Exasol 8 became more open and flexible than ever.

Most importantly, 2025.1 marked our commitment to a predictable, bi-annual release cadence, ensuring our users get innovation faster, with stability they can trust.

Executive Summary: Why Exasol 2025.2 Changes the Game

Are you ready to break free from analytics limitations? As data volumes soar and AI transforms every industry, agility and cost efficiency are critical. Exasol 8 Release 2025.2 is built for this moment, delivering open, context-rich AI, personal cloud-scale analytics, and benchmark-leading speed on a platform designed for everyone. Discover our latest release, explore what’s new, and join the Exasol community shaping the future of analytics.

Explore our latest release: discover what’s new, see the results, and be part of the Exasol community. 

Benchmark Results

Imagine running your most complex analytics in minutes, not hours.

That’s the reality with Exasol 2025.2. Community feedback has driven us to new heights of performance, and now the numbers speak for themselves:

  • 4x faster analytics than DuckDB (Polars Decision Support Benchmark, single node)
  • 10x faster median runtime than ClickHouse (TPC-H Benchmark), and up to 207x faster for complex queries

Test Exasol’s speed yourself, share your results in the forums!

Exasol Personal: Free Software, Unlimited Analytics, Just Add Your Cloud

Unlock advanced analytics and machine learning with Exasol Personal. Our software is completely free for individual users, with no feature limits or hidden costs. You can analyze huge datasets and build big ideas, just bring your own cloud account (currently AWS; support for Azure and GCP coming soon).

Quick Start (in under 5 minutes):

Make sure you have the Exasol Launcher installed and your AWS profile configured (See the Quick Start Guide for detailed setup instructions.)

  1. Create a deployment directory: mkdir deployment
  2. Change into deployment directory cd deployment
  3. Install Exasol Personal: exasol install

No infrastructure headaches. Just instant analytics.

  • Unlimited data, unlimited nodes, no artificial caps
  • Bring Your Own Cloud: AWS now; Azure and GCP coming soon
  • 100% free for single-user use, no feature gating, no hidden costs, no trial expiration

Share your projects and benchmarks in the Exasol Community Forum, and if you’re ready to scale up, upgrade options are available at your fingertips.

Try Exasol Personal now

Effortless Integration & Migration

Moving data and analytics shouldn’t mean starting from scratch. Exasol 2025.2 is built for interoperability, so you can keep using the tools you love and migrate painlessly when you’re ready.

  • DBT Integration: Run dbt transformations natively for centralized, efficient data pipeline management.
  • SQLGlot Integration: Transpile from 30+ SQL dialects (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Spark, etc.) to Exasol SQL, lowering migration barriers and reducing manual rewrites, allowing you to translate queries easily using our mighty preprocessor functionality.

Built a connector or migration guide? Share it with the community to help others move faster.

Advanced AI/ML: GPU Acceleration & Conversational Analytics

Accelerating AI and ML isn’t just about speed, it’s about unlocking new possibilities. With Exasol’s GPU acceleration, you can turn yesterday’s bottlenecks into today’s breakthroughs.

Accelerate your AI and ML workloads with Exasol’s GPU-powered engine:

  • Distributed model training and inference
  • 7x faster semantic search and operations in early testing
  • One GPU core = 24 CPU cores for high-volume transformations
  • Script Language Container: Run UDFs on GPUs; leverage GPU libraries via SQL with ease
  • Text-to-AI: Instantly analyze and enrich unstructured text data using in-database AI models
  • Cut compute costs for ML/AI workloads by up to 60% in internal benchmarks

Conversational Analytics, Agent-Ready: Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Imagine asking your data a business question in plain English and getting an answer in seconds. That’s the power of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), now open source and ready for community-driven innovation.

  • High concurrency, high speed: Handle thousands of queries, sub-second response times, even under heavy agent load
  • Flexible deployment: On-prem, cloud, or hybrid, including regulated, air-gapped environments
  • Natural language to SQL: “What were my sales last quarter?” – get an answer in seconds

Explore MCP on GitHub and share your creative use cases, we would love to hear from you!

Lakehouse Turbo: UI & Onboarding Experience

Unlock next-generation analytics with the Lakehouse Turbo Self-Service UI. Onboard teams in under an hour with intuitive workflows and centralized data management, all designed for simplicity and speed.

  • Enhance your existing Databricks cloud instances and unlock scalable, enterprise-grade analytics
  • Query Delta Lake tables directly from Exasol using virtual schema connectors, enabling fast, reliable analytics on cloud data lakes
  • Operate within governed Databricks environments – Exasol respect access controls and metadata defined in Unity Catalogue when accessing Delta Lake tables via Databricks
  • Rapid onboarding for individuals and teams, go from zero to first insight in minutes, no infrastructure headaches, no hidden costs

Visit LakehouseTurbo.com for a live demo and more details.

Rapid Innovation & Developer Experience

Alongside Exasol version 2025.2 we are excited to launch Exasol Labs (https://github.com/exasol-labs). This is a dedicated space for prototypes built by developers. Exasol Labs is a great way to launch and test new functionality and get it in the hands of our users as fast as possible. Innovation moves fast, and projects like Exasol Labs allow us to move fast and deliver you exciting new features!

Exasol Labs includes several exciting new projects:

  • ML Flow integration: now you can combine enterprise-grade model management with Exasol’s industry leading performance.
  • Text-to-SQL: An extension to Exasol’s MCP Server that provides a governed SQL experience for more accurate and more secure query generation
  • Updated Community Edition: Now with even more getting started content, data migration and virtual schema demos!

Onboarding & User Experience: Simpler, Stronger, Enterprise-Ready

Getting started is easier than ever. Exasol 2025.2 introduces streamlined onboarding tools that help both individuals and teams ramp up quickly and efficiently, whether you’re exploring analytics solo or scaling up across the enterprise.

  • Exasol Personal: Experience unlimited analytics at zero cost, with quick onboarding for individual contributors, developers, and data scientists. Go from zero to first insight in minutes, no infrastructure headaches, no hidden costs.
  • Lakehouse Turbo Self-Service UI: Onboard teams in under an hour with intuitive workflows and centralized data management.
    Enhance your existing Databricks cloud instances and unlock scalable, enterprise-grade analytics.

Growth Engine: Product-Led, Measurable, and Community-Driven

Exasol 2025.2 isn’t just a release, it’s a movement. Every day, more data professionals are joining our community forum, discovering how quickly they can get started, and sharing their experiences. With monthly hackathons, webinars, and technical challenges, there are always new ways to learn, connect, and shape the future of analytics together.

Ready to make your mark? Whether you host a hackathon, join a webinar, or tackle a technical challenge, every contribution counts. Get involved, share your expertise, and help shape the future of Exasol – your innovation could be our next big breakthrough!

Roadmap & Vision: Building the Modern Analytics Platform

Exasol 2025.2 marks the beginning of a platform that puts power directly in the hands of builders. We are launching in Exasol Personal as a frictionless way for anyone to explore large-scale analytics and AI on their own terms, while deepening our investment in developer experience – simpler onboarding, richer tooling, and integrations that fit naturally into modern workflows.

Looking ahead, we’re exploring cloud-native deployment paths, stronger automation, and an ecosystem that feels instantly familiar to developers: trusted connectors, extensible UDFs, and intuitive tools from SQL to VS Code. AI continues to shape our direction as we bring emerging vector, semantic, and agent-ready capabilities closer to the data, all while continually improving Exasol’s hallmark performance.

Our goal is straightforward: make Exasol the easiest, fastest, and most flexible engine for anyone building with data, whether they’re experimenting solo or powering enterprise-scale systems. Guided by our community, we’re creating a platform that lowers barriers, accelerates innovation, and stays ready for whatever comes next.

Ready to Experience Analytics Without Limits?

Your checklist for the latest 2025.2 release:

Share your first Exasol Personal project or ask questions in our community forum.

Thank you for being part of the Exasol community. Let’s build the future of analytics together.

Product
Florian Wenzel
Florian Wenzel

As VP of Product Management at Exasol, Florian Wenzel is dedicated to developing products that customers love. His key responsibilities include aligning direct customer needs with innovative features to create impactful and strategic product roadmaps. Florian brings a wealth of experience to his role, having previously served as the Global Head of Solution Engineering. This position honed his deep understanding of diverse use cases and equipped him with extensive expertise in database technologies—an area he has thoroughly explored during his PhD studies. With a strong foundation in customer-focused product development and technical proficiency, Florian continues to drive Exasol’s mission to deliver outstanding database solutions.