Andy Pavlo: AI agents create 80% of new databases and keep deleting production ones
mattturck · x · 2026-10-08
Matt Turck's in-depth podcast with CMU database professor Andy Pavlo, who is building a research lab inside ClickHouse. Key points:
- Agents reshape databases: Neon reports 80% of new databases are created by agents, which also keep deleting production databases — hence "toddler-and-stairs" guardrails.
- Volume explosion: agent-era workloads mean 10-100x more queries across four eras of database usage.
- Agent memory: files vs. databases ("everything is a database"); MCP as an emerging database interface.
- Text-to-SQL accuracy jumped from 60% to 99.5%; trust an agent like a junior developer.
- AI writes databases: Opus 4 rebuilt CMU course projects; 60% of open-source databases now have AI commits; LLMs do 85% of tuning in 15 minutes.
- Market takes: Databricks, Snowflake and ClickHouse all added Postgres; verdicts on vector/graph/GPU databases; "the relational model is arithmetic, SQL is the new assembly language"; the market is "a cheetah on cocaine in a Ferrari."
Related event: Andy Pavlo on How AI Agents Will Reshape Databases(3 posts)→
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