Iterative workloads caught vendors off guard, but requirements for a clean-slate solution remain unclear

Percona CEO Peter Farkas reckons AI caught the database industry off guard and that agentic workloads may eventually require a new kind of database – once anyone works out what those workloads actually need.

Farkas spoke to The Register at the company's Percona Live event in Amsterdam, where members of the often-fractious open source database community gathered to discuss best practices, case studies, and the future.

Percona provides software and support across a growing range of open source database technologies. Over its 20-year history, it has worked with MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Valkey, and Redis.

MySQL's first release arrived in 1995. The PostgreSQL project marked its 30th anniversary in July 2026, although its roots in the POSTGRES project stretch back further.

Both databases therefore have decades behind them and represent mature, stable options – just as the conservative world of database administration prefers. The surge in AI services, however, is introducing workloads that these systems were not designed around, and Farkas believes none of the current choices are ideal.

Of the current selection, Farkas said: "It's definitely not the best that we can have. It's the thing that we have right now."

"I think AI definitely caught the industry off guard," he said. Farkas pointed to "iteration-focused workloads" in which an agent might make 150 attempts before a person or another system selects the best result.

"A human would probably not push 150 options just so someone or another AI can pick out the winning one," he said.

...read more at theregister.com