David Walker, Field CTO at Yugabyte, delivers an insightful talk on the evolution of database modernization in cloud-native environments at Navigate Europe 23. He discusses the journey of transformation over the last two decades, categorizing it into three waves: infrastructure modernization, application modernization, and database modernization. Walker delves into the current landscape of database technologies, highlighting the limitations of legacy and non-relational databases, and introduces distributed SQL databases as a comprehensive solution. He emphasizes the importance of elastic scalability, automated management, and compliance, ultimately envisioning a future where databases are fully managed, scalable, and cloud-native services.