Exasol 2026.1: The Sovereign Analytics Database for the Agentic Era

AI tooling is advancing fast, but for many data teams, progress feels slower than ever.

Models live outside the database. Analytics pipelines are increasingly fragmented. Governance becomes harder just as AI adoption accelerates. And what works in a prototype often breaks down at scale.

At the same time, a new constraint is emerging: control.

As organizations move from experimentation to production AI, especially with autonomous and semi-autonomous agents, the question is no longer just what AI can do. It is how reliably, securely, and at what scale these systems can operate and who controls the data and intelligence they depend on.

Agentic systems introduce entirely new infrastructure demands around concurrency, low-latency execution, and trusted data quality. Enterprises need platforms built not just for AI experimentation, but for governed AI operations at enterprise scale.

Exasol 2026.1, released on May 26, 2026, answers that question with a clear position:

Exasol is the Sovereign Analytics Database for the Agentic Era. We combine high-performance analytical power with the data control enterprises demand. Whether organizations are running complex BI workloads or autonomous AI agents, Exasol delivers the speed needed to experiment and scale while keeping data, execution, and governance within the environments customer’s trust.

This release takes a decisive step forward in bringing AI directly into the database, reducing fragmentation, preserving governance, and enabling teams to move from first query to enterprise-scale AI without rearchitecting their stack.

Built for the Way Enterprises Scale Analytics and Agentic AI

As enterprises move beyond experimentation into production AI systems, infrastructure requirements are changing rapidly. Organizations need platforms that support both traditional analytics and emerging agentic workflows without sacrificing governance, sovereignty, or deployment flexibility.

Most enterprises are not replacing analytics with AI, they are combining them. Business intelligence, machine learning, and autonomous AI agents increasingly operate together within the same data ecosystem. Exasol is designed for this reality, delivering high-performance analytics while enabling organizations to run AI and agentic workloads within governed, trusted environments.

The journey to value typically looks like this:

• Deploy – Get a sandbox for AI agents running quickly, close to where you work
• Load – Bring in your data and reach first and second queries fast
• Explore – Interact with data, increasingly through conversational interfaces
• Enrich – Apply AI and advanced analytics directly to live data
• Surface – Consume insights through BI, data apps, or AI agents

There is also a sixth step, often overlooked but critical: scale.

In an agentic world, scale is not just about handling more data. It is about whether AI systems can run inside a governed, high-performance database environment, without losing control as they move to production.

Unlike AI platforms that require sensitive enterprise data to move into external ecosystems, Exasol enables organizations to maintain control over where data lives, where AI executes, and how governance is enforced. This gives enterprises the flexibility to innovate with AI while preserving sovereignty, compliance, and operational trust.

Deploy Anywhere: Enhanced Exasol Personal

Exasol Personal was introduced ahead of this release, but with Exasol 2026.1 it becomes significantly more flexible, reinforcing its role as the fastest way to get started with Exasol.

With 2026.1, Exasol Personal expands its supported cloud environments to include:

• Microsoft Azure
• Exoscale

Beyond these additions, Exasol Personal is built on a flexible cloud framework that enables customers to extend deployments across virtually any cloud environment while maintaining consistent performance, governance, and operational control.

This allows users to deploy Exasol close to where they already work across cloud, hybrid, or on-premises environments without being locked into a single provider.

This deployment optionality is not just flexibility. It is foundational to sovereign AI architectures, where control over data location, processing, and access must remain with the enterprise.

Exasol Personal remains a free, fully functional, single-user edition, with:

• No feature gating
• Unlimited data volume (infrastructure permitting)
• Unlimited nodes within a single-user setup

Infrastructure as Code, by Design

Exasol Personal uses Terraform-based deployment automation to simplify provisioning across supported cloud environments. This gives teams a faster, repeatable way to deploy, evaluate, and experiment with Exasol using infrastructure practices already familiar to modern platform and engineering teams.

For AI workloads, this means teams and agents using deployment skills can establish controlled, reproducible database environments, from experimentation to production while maintaining governance throughout.

Load Modern Data Faster with Parquet and Iceberg

Reducing time to insight starts with frictionless data onboarding. Exasol 2026.1 delivers significant improvements for modern data formats.

Expanded Parquet Support

Parquet data can now be loaded directly from a broader range of storage environments, including:

• Amazon S3 and S3-compatible storage

• Azure Blob Storage

• HTTPS and SFTP endpoints

• Local file systems

This expanded connectivity gives organizations greater flexibility in how and where they access analytical data across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.

Schema Inference and GLOB Patterns

These capabilities reduce the manual effort involved in working with semi-structured and file-based data, making ingestion and data preparation faster and more intuitive for both human users and AI-driven agents.

• Automatic schema inference from Parquet files
• GLOB pattern loading for faster bulk ingestion

Native Apache Iceberg Support

Exasol 2026.1 expands interoperability with modern open table formats through native Apache Iceberg support, helping enterprises integrate analytics workloads more easily across cloud data ecosystems.

Lakehouse Turbo: High-Performance Analytics Without Replacing Your Stack

Exasol complements modern lakehouse architectures by providing a high-performance analytics database alongside platforms such as Spark, Photon, and Starburst.

With Exasol 2026.1, it expands support for:

• Databricks and Iceberg catalogs
• Cloud and on-premises deployments
• Schema evolution and change data capture

This allows organizations to combine open architectures with a high-performance analytical database layer, avoiding the trade-off between flexibility and performance.

Bring AI to the Database and Keep It Under Control

Exasol 2026.1 is built on a simple principle:

AI and increasingly AI agents should execute as close to the data as possible, within governed database environments.

This is what defines a sovereign analytics database for AI: giving systems access to models and knowledge without losing control over data, execution, or derived intelligence.

Native AI Functions in SQL

New native AI functions callable directly from SQL support:

• Classification
• Entailment
• Information extraction
• Translation

They execute inside the database, in parallel, preserving performance and governance.

MCP Server for Governed AI Access

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server delivers true conversational analytics and allows AI models and agents to interact with Exasol while enforcing:

• Access control
• Security policies
• User-level governance

Exasol Agent Skills

Agent skills are an Exasol developer’s best friend. They provide guidance and guardrails for building AI solutions on top of Exasol, including:

• Loading data from various sources
• Optimizing SQL queries
• Creating custom Exasol objects like user defined functions and virtual schemas
• Automating workflows

These building blocks help developers and platform teams accelerate the creation of AI-driven analytics workflows on top of Exasol, reducing the effort required to operationalize agentic use cases.

Developer resources and example implementations are available through the Exasol community and GitHub repositories.

Transform with dbt: SQL-First analytics databaseering

Exasol 2026.1 introduces native dbt integration, enabling modular, version-controlled transformation workflows directly on the database.

Exasol is now a trusted dbt connector.

This ensures that AI and analytics workloads are built on a governed, SQL-first foundation, rather than fragmented pipelines.

Scaling for Enterprise AI

Exasol 2026.1 continues to support Exasol’s broader vision of reducing friction between experimentation and enterprise deployment.

Organizations increasingly need the flexibility to move from:

• Personal environments

• To team deployments

• To enterprise production

while minimizing operational complexity and maintaining consistent governance across environments.

In the agentic era, this becomes increasingly important. The challenge is no longer just building AI, it is operating AI systems reliably, at scale, and within environments enterprises trust and control.

Try Exasol 2026.1 – The Sovereign Analytics Database for the Agentic Era

Exasol 2026.1 isn’t just a feature update. It’s a step change in how analytics, AI, and databases come together:

• Simpler
• Faster
• Governed
• Built for real-world AI

The Agentic Era will require more than AI acceleration alone. Enterprises need platforms that combine analytical performance, trusted governance, and deployment flexibility at scale. Exasol is built to deliver exactly that, as the Sovereign Analytics Database for the Agentic Era.

If you’re experimenting with AI outside your database or struggling to productionize agentic use cases, Exasol offers a better path:

• Run AI where your data lives. Keep control where it matters.
• Start with Exasol Personal.
• Deploy on the infrastructure you trust.
• Bring analytics and agentic AI together inside a governed, sovereign platform.

Exasol 2026.1 is available on May 26, 2026.