• Data Eng & Infrastructure

AI agents are driving a new category of operational databases, creating workloads that look nothing like traditional SaaS traffic. In Lakebase today, over 80 percent of new databases are created programmatically by agents rather than humans, resulting in extreme burstiness, highly ephemeral environments, and large volumes of short lived databases. These patterns push classic OLTP assumptions, including always on instances, steady traffic, and tightly coupled storage and compute, beyond their limits. In this talk, we will explain why existing databases struggle with agent workloads and how a new OLTP design emerges from separating storage and compute, enabling fast autoscaling, true scale to zero, and database branching that allows agents to run experiments and roll back state instantly. Using Lakebase and serverless Postgres as a concrete example, we will share practical design lessons for anyone building data infrastructure in the agent era.