Agents could mean 10 to 100x more database queries

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 10:48

   you would want to expose that to agents as well. Understood. Is there anything that's fundamentally different compared to human? Is that, I think you alluded to volume and scalability. Does that change everything? The fact that you have possibly billions of agents taking actions? And how they interact with databases? I gotta be honest, I don't know the answer, right? Like it's still early to say, and I get, I mean, the volume, of course, yeah, right?

2. 11:12

   Because agents are running 24-7 in a way that humans cannot. But we've seen similar patterns in databases before, where we've seen increase in volume. And I would sort of say there's been three eras and we're now in the fourth one. The first one was like at the very beginning of just having a database in general, like you can now start putting in information and run transactions and store things for your organization in a way you couldn't before when it was all pencil and paper.

3. 11:39

   So probably like 70s and 80s, there was a obvious increase in the volume of traffic you need to handle in a database. But in that era, it was mostly humans interacting with the database, but at their jobs. Because no one would go home and no one had a computer necessarily in like the 80s, certainly not the level we had now. So that was sort of, I'd say, one era we had an increase in volume. Then in the 1990s, early 2000s, the internet comes along and now everyone can interact with databases through websites and through the internet at home.

4. 12:08

   So you saw a spike in volume in that level. Then the next era would be mobile phones. Now everyone, at any given time, has various apps running and they can interact with websites. to then put things and read things from databases. So I would say that would be a theory. So now agents, I think, is the next chapter in the story where now it's every human not only has a cell phone, but now they also can have maybe hundreds of agents interacting on their behalf that are then reading, writing data from a database.

5. 12:41

   At the end of the day, when you name an application, it's always been backed by a database. So it's going to cause the application to read and write information, read and write data. So I don't think we're there yet because every human obviously doesn't have hundreds of agents running 24-7. But what's interesting about what could happen is when you think of a human interacting with their cell phone or their laptop on a website or an application, they're kind of really only doing it when they're awake, right?

6. 13:07

   You can only do one thing at a time. Like I can't sit with my one cell phone in one hand and the laptop in another hand, like do things at the same time. It kind of like only is limited what the human can actually do. But you can imagine a world where these agents are just 24-7 always running and acting as if they were humans and interacting with things. So like the volume would increase quite significantly.

7. 13:26

   And then furthermore, unlike like a web app, they're usually going to be, you could argue like, you know, how's this agent really different than like IoT devices or cell phones now? Like IoT devices are just streaming inserts of here's the measurements I'm getting. You know, with cell phone apps, they're usually reading data, right? But you can imagine these agents do more complex operations where it is a combination of read and writes.

8. 13:47

   and then that makes the traffic more interesting. So I think there's going to be potentially a 10 to 100x increase in volume and the number of queries that are going to hit up against databases. And I don't think, we're not there at that level yet, but I definitely have heard from my friends in industry that they're seeing the sort of thing. We've seen the same thing at ClickHouse. What I don't know yet though is whether the sophistication of the interactions are more or less than what humans can currently do.

9. 14:18

   I've seen some people say, well, the type of queries that the agent would generate or SQL queries the agent would generate is actually more shallow because it's just trying to like maybe read one or two tables at a time, try to figure out what's in there versus like if someone uses a dashboard or like a BI tool like Tableau or MicroStrategy, they may be doing like very complex joins across the different tables.

10. 14:38

    I don't know yet whether agents are at that level or whether they're just kind of going at it, really trying to read data against the database in more simple terms so i mean so your question is like are agents going to change things i think yes right now definitely in volume and i think that's going to increase even further and of course now when the agents are running they're generating their own telemetry so that you have to store store that and make sense of that and that's another challenge but in terms of like whether the the actual patterns of what they're doing how different is that yet that remains to be seen this is something i'm trying to research as well. Yeah. Some fantastic stuff in there that I want to go back to in a minute. But there is a