Temporal Technologies Acquires Crystal DBA

We created Crystal DBA to pursue a mission of simplifying software development, particularly in the cloud and at scale. We are now joining forces with Temporal Technologies, a company that delivers on this mission better than anyone.

If you visit the Temporal Technologies website, you will read that the company provides “durable execution” which makes software “crash-proof.” Tantalizing concepts, but what do they really mean?

Temporal is not a database, at least not in the traditional sense. However, the innovations it embodies are some of the most important advances in state management of the past decade. If you haven’t followed Temporal’s rise, pay attention.

What makes Temporal so special is that it brings key benefits traditionally found only in transactional database systems to ordinary programs written in languages such as Java, Python, TypeScript, or Go. It ensures that these programs pick up where they left off in the event of a crash, replacing masses of complex failure handling logic with simple guarantees.

Suppose an AI agent is halfway through a complex research task when an LLM returns an unexpected exception—say on account of a rate limit. Even if the program does not contain logic to handle this condition, Temporal will automatically retry the problematic LLM call until it succeeds.

Under the hood, Temporal employs a combination of techniques—memoization of I/O, replay of deterministic code, and, in some cases, checkpointing—to ensure that programs recover when something unexpected goes wrong. At every critical step, Temporal sends the program execution state to a remote server, where it is stored safely. The client-side SDKs provide the magic that puts all of the state back in place after things go wrong.

The Crystal DBA team is contributing expertise to accelerate adoption of durable execution, especially in AI applications, and to make Temporal ever more robust and scalable. We look forward to sharing more about this work soon.

Crystal DBA open source software remains available. We have discontinued the Crystal DBA hosted service and other commercial offerings.