What Is

A coding agent that forgets your architecture decisions every time you open a new terminal is working exactly as designed. It is working as designed. Persistent AI agent memory is the external layer that stores and retrieves useful context across sessions, tools, and machines, so an agent in Claude Code, Codex, or Dify does not […]

Maintainers of well-known open source projects are dealing with a new kind of inbox. Pull requests still arrive, often in higher volume than ever, and many are clean, well-formatted, and plausible on first read. What changed is that one person can now produce a hundred of them in an afternoon, and the maintainer still has […]

When Plaid’s Amazon Aurora MySQL fleet faced a major-version upgrade, the estimate came back at six engineering months and tens of minutes of downtime. For a company whose APIs sit underneath thousands of financial apps, that is not a maintenance task. It is a product freeze. Plaid spent that effort moving to distributed SQL instead, […]

A serverless database is a cloud database that decouples compute from storage, scales capacity automatically as demand changes, and bills for what a workload actually consumes. Servers still exist. The difference is that you never size them, patch them, or pay for idle ones, and capacity planning stops being a launch-day decision. That difference matters […]

Key Takeaways Add a vector database to the existing stack. Sync it. Maintain it. Debug it when it drifts. Teams building agentic applications have largely accepted that sequence as the price of admission for working with embeddings, and the fourth step is the one worth pausing on. Drift is not an incidental bug waiting to […]

When a table crosses one terabyte, MySQL does not fail. It just starts charging for everything. A single index change takes over a week, blocks every other change queued behind it on the cluster, and demands a full shadow copy of the table just to run. At Bolt, whose ride-hailing, micromobility, delivery, and car rental […]

Believing in Growth: A Hard Question From a Distributed Systems Veteran A few years ago, I was talking with the chief architect of a very well-known global company that offers a home sharing marketplace. He opened with a genuinely tough question. “Siddon, I have spent decades building distributed systems. Google Bigtable, for one. I have […]

Cloud-native databases have made it easier to ship transactional applications. Managed services, automatic failover, and elastic storage are now table stakes. The harder problems show up later: When a multi-tenant SaaS app starts hitting tail-latency spikes during compaction, when a serverless tier saturates a noisy neighbor, or when a dedicated cluster sits at 30% utilization […]

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The New Stack and is republished with permission. The original version is available here. When enterprises talk about artificial intelligence, the attention usually points to models: larger parameters, faster inference, cheaper tokens. But we at next-gen database maker PingCAP contend that this framing misses the most consequential change now […]

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The New Stack and is republished with permission. The original version is available here. For decades, database designers have built distributed databases around the assumption that storage must live close to compute. The farther data travels over the network, the reasoning goes, the greater the potential for delay. Local […]

Reducing P999 latency in distributed databases is one of the hardest challenges in modern OLTP systems. A handful of slow requests can cascade across services, break SLOs, and directly impact business outcomes, especially in latency-sensitive environments like trading platforms and real-time applications. This is the challenge of tail latency. As systems scale, variability compounds: queueing […]

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The New Stack and is republished with permission. The original version is available here. Data teams that thrived in the last wave of Software as a Service (SaaS) platform scale weren’t the ones that chased hype. They were the ones that made a few smart decisions: They adopted cloud-first […]