Layer researchData platform
Vendor landscape
As of 2026-08-19. Vendor capability claims are vendor-published unless third-party sourced. Re-verify quarterly.
- Vendor / product
- Snowflake (semantic views, Cortex Search/Analyst), Databricks (Unity Catalog metrics, Genie, Agent Bricks), BigQuery, MS Fabric/Power BI
- Category
- Platforms with bundled semantics + vector
- Maturity (Aug 2026)
- GA waves 2024-2025
- Notes
- Bundled is table stakes; semantics converging via OSI
- Vendor / product
- dbt Labs (Semantic Layer, MCP server, dbt Agents), Cube (D3), Looker (LookML + Conversational Analytics GA 2025)
- Category
- Semantic-layer specialists
- Maturity (Aug 2026)
- Active; OSI founders
- Notes
- Choose where determinism is the requirement
- Vendor / product
- Open Semantic Interchange (OSI)
- Category
- Portability spec
- Maturity (Aug 2026)
- v1 Apache-2.0, Jan 2026
- Notes
- Watch for lock-in relief across semantic stacks
- Vendor / product
- pgvector + pgvectorscale; Elasticsearch/OpenSearch vector
- Category
- Existing-engine vector
- Maturity (Aug 2026)
- Mature; BBQ/DiskBBQ 2025
- Notes
- The ladder's middle rungs
- Vendor / product
- Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, Milvus
- Category
- Dedicated vector DBs
- Maturity (Aug 2026)
- Funding continues; category retreating to verticals
- Notes
- Viability question belongs in selection
- Vendor / product
- MongoDB Atlas, Oracle 23ai, SQL Server 2025 VECTOR, S3 Vectors
- Category
- Platform-bundled vector
- Maturity (Aug 2026)
- GA 2023-2025
- Notes
- Prefer where the corpus already lives
- Vendor / product
- Glean, Microsoft 365 semantic index, Amazon Q Business
- Category
- Permission-aware enterprise search
- Maturity (Aug 2026)
- Mature
- Notes
- The shipped ACL-sync reference architectures
- Vendor / product
- SpiceDB/AuthZed (Zanzibar class)
- Category
- ReBAC engines
- Maturity (Aug 2026)
- Production (OpenAI, Workday, Netflix)
- Notes
- Pre-filtering infrastructure
- Vendor / product
- Atlan, Collibra, Alation
- Category
- Catalogs as agent context
- Maturity (Aug 2026)
- MCP servers 2025-2026
- Notes
- Context, not execution; pair with semantic contracts
- Vendor / product
- Confluent (Tableflow, Streaming Agents), Debezium/Flink CDC
- Category
- Freshness infrastructure
- Maturity (Aug 2026)
- Tableflow GA Mar 2025
- Notes
- CDC default; streaming earned
Agent-washing watch: "AI-ready data platform" claims without ACL sync into indexes; catalogs marketed as agents; text-to-SQL demos benchmarked on toy schemas.
Source: research/R02-data-platform/vendors.md in the evidence repository behind this site.