Solution

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, […]

Key Takeaways An agent that forgets everything between calls can’t finish a multi-step task, can’t recover from a mid-workflow crash, and can’t show you what it actually did. That’s the practical cost of statelessness, and it’s the problem AI agent state exists to solve. AI agent state is the durable record of memory, task progress, […]

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The New Stack and is republished with permission. The original version is available here. A few months ago, I was reviewing a customer support agent who had a strange failure pattern. A user would chat with it on Monday about a billing issue, get partway through the resolution, and […]

An agent clones a repo, installs dependencies, reproduces a failing test, and gets three-quarters of the way through a fix. The sandbox hits its duration limit. The next run starts in an empty directory with the same task, the same prompt, and none of the evidence. Nothing crashed and nothing errored. The work was never […]

This article shows how to efficiently develop high-quality applications with TiDB, an open-source NewSQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads and can serve as a scale-out MySQL database without manual sharding.

MySQL AI, in the sense that matters most to application teams, means MySQL-compatible infrastructure that holds agent memory, tool outputs, embeddings, and persistent application state in one backend, with vector search and SQL available in the same query. Serverless MySQL for AI agents is that backend delivered as an auto-scaling service rather than a cluster […]

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 Introduction Prisma is the ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) most teams use for a TypeScript project, and it connects to TiDB through the standard MySQL provider, so a schema written for MySQL works unchanged. The connection is where the work is. Serverless functions and edge runtimes open and discard connections on every invocation, which is […]

On July 24, Jensen Huang made the first post of his life on X. It wasn’t a product launch or a victory lap. It was a policy letter signed by 25 companies, doubling to 50 within a day, asking Washington not to restrict open weight AI models. Microsoft, Meta, IBM, a16z, and Hugging Face. The […]

As a database veteran, I found traditional monolithic databases (such as Oracle) to have bottlenecks for mission critical applications in the cloud, which called for a next generation cloud native database to solve these challenges. This is what excited me about joining the PingCAP team, where we took the core concept of Distributed SQL’s multi-node auto-sharding architecture and extended it to allow for greater flexibility and functionality beyond Spanner and other Distributed SQL databases. It is also open source and has helped to change the landscape for developers.

Agentic AI architecture is the system design that lets an AI agent perceive context, reason over it, call tools, maintain memory, and take actions across multiple steps. It spans the model, the orchestration layer, and the data infrastructure that makes an agent’s work durable rather than disposable. Most teams get the model and framework right […]

A serverless database is a fully-managed database that automatically scales compute and storage with demand, requires no server provisioning or capacity planning, and bills only for actual usage, including scaling to zero when idle. The provider handles infrastructure; you handle data. That definition covers the category. It doesn’t cover the problem most teams actually face […]