The Data Stack Consolidation: Confluent, EDB and Google Take Different Routes
HPCWire, Friday, November 6th, 2026
Confluent, EDB and Google Cloud each announced ways to cut the layers and data copies in the enterprise data stack.
BigDATAwire's Ali Azhar looks at three announcements that blur the lines between transactional, streaming and analytical systems.
Confluent introduced Streamhouse, whose Lightning Tables let companies query Kafka data directly, and it already offers Tableflow to move Kafka data into Iceberg and Delta Lake tables.
EDB is acquiring Altinity to pair PostgreSQL with ClickHouse analytics through a shared Iceberg catalog and common access controls, with an emphasis on data sovereignty, while Google expanded AlloyDB's Apache Iceberg support so operational and lakehouse data can be queried together.
The author says this could reduce pipelines and duplicate data, but warns about specialization trade-offs, vendor lock-in and features that are not yet available.