A Milestone, Update, and Look Ahead
The Cloud Database Report keeps growing as business rallies around data and AI
Welcome everyone! I’m John Foley, a long-time tech journalist who has also worked in strategic comms at Oracle, IBM, and MongoDB. Now I’m an independent tech writer. I’m based in New York; the selfie was taken on a recent trip to Ireland.
Hi all. I’ve been plugging away on the Cloud Database Report for 4+ years now, and I’m overdue to provide an update on how things are going.
First and foremost — a heart-felt thank you to Cloud Database subscribers, both those of you who have been with me from the start and the newbies who continue to sign up every day. This newsletter’s steady growth has been entirely through recommendations, sharing, word of mouth. I truly appreciate every time someone shares, messages, comments, and signs up.
The Cloud Database Report reaches thousands of people through Substack, LinkedIn, and X. I’m happy to note that May 2025 was its most-viewed month in more than three years. Why? There’s an insatiable appetite to understand, and keep up with the changing landscape, in data and AI.
Subscribers keep growing, as you can see from the chart below for the past 12 months. The two spikes were due to bots, then Substack took corrective action.
Exclusive insights for the price of an iced latte
Substack, as you may know, continues to grow in popularity, driven by independent writers and its subscription model. According to Perplexity, paid subs on Substack surpassed 5 million in March, up from 4 million four months earlier.
The Cloud Database Report was originally available with a paid-subscription option, but I paused paid subs when things got busy in my full-time job as a tech writer. Now that I’m an independent writer again (see my LinkedIn post about that), I’ve turned the subscription button back on. It’s $8 a month, which is what my daughter recently paid for an iced coffee here in the New York area. (To be fair, it was a banana-bread-flavored ice latte with oat milk.)
So please sign up for a paid sub if you’re so inclined. If not, that’s fine, too.
I’m also making the Cloud Database Report available to sponsored content. I’ve already experimented with that model. I attended Salesforce’s Dreamforce and TDX conferences as a paid influencer and published my analysis in the Cloud Database Report. Cockroach Labs and InterSystems sponsored my podcasts in the past.
If and when I have these types of partnerships, I will always be transparent about that. And my analysis will always meet my own strict editorial standards for accuracy and credibility.
Who you know
I’ve got a lot of ideas on how to keep things interesting, starting with who you know is as important as what you know. I’ve been fortunate to have excellent access to industry leaders throughout my 30-year career as a tech journalist and that continues to be true with the Cloud Database Report.
Last week, I interviewed Jeff Haynie, CEO of Agentuity, a startup building infrastructure for agentic AI. This week, I’ll be talking to Shireesh Thota, Corporate VP of Databases as Microsoft. Watch for blog posts on both conversations in the days ahead.
And I’m branching out. I recently launched a second Substack newsletter, Zettabytes, that is focused on data and AI and my interest in high-scale systems. You can check it out and sign up here.
Even IBM is waking up
A common theme in the Cloud Database Report has been that the 50-year-old database market simply doesn’t slow down.
Oracle and Microsoft, which have been around for a combined 98 years, continue to innovate. Databricks and Snowflake are surging. Even IBM seems to be waking up with its acquisition of DataStax. And there’s a high level of startup activity driven by the AI opportunity.
Last year, I wrote that the $100 billion database market was on track to surpass 1,000 different database management systems. We’re now past that point. Let’s keep the conversation going.