Research house Forrester has evaluated 14 multi-model database suppliers and announced four leaders: EDB, Oracle, Microsoft, and MongoDB.
Its Forrester Wave: Multi-model Data Platforms, Q2 2026 report notes specialized databases have come into being, such as relational for transactions, document for flexibility, graph for relationships, vector for retrieval, and time-series for telemetry. Although enterprises could choose each one on a best-of breed basis, it means they have “operational fragmentation. Each engine carries its own query language, security model, administrative tooling, and skill requirement. Data moves between them through pipelines that introduce latency, consistency gaps, and governance seams.”
Now AI-native applications and agentic workflows require integrated, low-latency access to heterogeneous data within a single transactional and semantic boundary. Multi-model databases “address this by supporting multiple data models within a unified engine, with shared transaction semantics, query interfaces, governance, and operational tooling.”
The Forrester analysts have evaluated 14 suppliers who are discussed in the report, and presented in a Wave diagram. This shows two concentric quarter circles placed in a square space defined by a vertical current offering axis and a strategy strength horizontal axis. The three areas in this space, moving from left to right, are named Contenders, Strong Performers, and Leaders with suppliers ranked and placed in each category area:
The Wave report includes a supplier scorecard for current offering items such as multi-model breadth and security, observability and data quality, plus a strategy section looking at vision, innovation, and more items. You can get a copy of the report from EDB here. Couchbase, a Strong Perfirmer, has a double halo as it's a customer favorite, based on feedback.
According to EDB, enterprises are racing to unify fragmented, single-purpose data engines into one platform that can serve transactional, analytical, and AI workloads for the agentic era. EDB PG AI is built to meet that shift, extending transactional workloads into analytical and AI processing on a unified, open source foundation with capabilities for interoperability, sovereign deployments, and agentic AI use cases.
Kevin Dallas, EDB CEO, said: “This [Forrester Wave] recognition reflects what we've been building toward: a platform where intelligence moves to the data, not the other way around. In the agentic era, AI runs on the data layer—governed, sovereign, and enforced at the source. We believe being named a Leader validates that the future of enterprise AI is open, sovereign, and built on Postgres."
EDB Postgres AI (EDB PG AI) was rated as a Leader across both the strategy and current offering categories and received the highest score possible in the Strength of Strategy area (Vision, Innovation, Roadmap, and Partner Ecosystem criteria). Oracle received the highest score in the Strength of Offering rating.