Autonomous agents have met their biggest challenge yet: The database.
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Database challenges for autonomous agents, highly relevant to AI agent orchestration.
Summary
Autonomous agents hit their hardest challenge in databases, where hallucinated queries or config changes can crash entire systems, says CMU's Andy Pavlo at Percona Live 2026. While coding agents easily replicate standard data structures like B+ trees, tuning agents for knobs and indexes remain siloed and struggle with the exponential configuration space. The ultimate 'double black diamond' is the query optimizer, which lacks clean open-source references and is deeply embedded in production systems.