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AlloyDB delivers PostgreSQL for agents: Real-time data at agent scale, with full workload isolation Raj Pai VP, Product Management, Databases Sujatha Mandava Senior Director, Product Management, Databases Enterprises rely on mission-critical operational databases where performance slowdowns simply aren’t an option. Yet when even a few agents execute dense reasoning loops, the unpredictable surge in queries can easily overwhelm traditional architectures. Today, we’re announcing that AlloyDB delivers PostgreSQL for agents (in preview), enabling real-time data access without compromising your mission-critical systems. AlloyDB now scales to dynamic agent bursts by provisioning sandboxed database instances in seconds, enabling full workload isolation. You can cost-effectively run your agents at any scale — from a few agents to millions of agents — and the instances automatically spin down when agents finish. With this announcement: - AlloyDB now features an agentic database architecture engineered to scale PostgreSQL to thousands of serverless database instances that have up-to-the-second read-only access to production. These instances remain fully separated from the primary, standby, and read replica instances where production workloads run. - Each of these instances access real-time data in the database backed by a unified storage layer in Colossus, Google’s exabyte-scale distributed storage system. This helps agents achieve sub-millisecond I/O, and terabit-per-second aggregated scan throughput, supporting over 3 million queries per second. - These instances utilize the full AlloyDB PostgreSQL engine, providing access to every index, the full capability of SQL, and comprehensive vector, full-text, and spatial search. Agents can also leverage BigQuery and Spark to run lakehouse analytics without requiring complex ETL pipelines. - When agents complete their tasks, these instances scale right back to zero, thus reducing your cloud spend by billing only for active reasoning loops. With AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, we pioneered the agentic enterprise relational database by integrating advanced vector operations, machine learning inference, and foundation model integrations directly within a 100% PostgreSQL-compatible engine. It protects your data through deep Google Cloud security integrations — replacing static passwords with IAM authentication, isolating traffic via VPC Service Controls, and providing customer-managed encryption and auditing. This functionality, combined with the scalability now provided by our agentic architecture for agents, makes AlloyDB the premier enterprise-grade agentic PostgreSQL offering. Why this matters In today’s agentic era, we’re swiftly moving from single copilot agent interactions to networks of millions of agents collaborating simultaneously. When these agents query and operate all at once, sudden traffic spikes can overwhelm your core databases, competing with the systems that run your business. Agents require both fast analytics and low-latency access to real-time production data, utilizing B-tree, vector, text, and spatial indexes to efficiently execute their workflows. Emerging architectures rely on page-caching layers that sit above object storage, but they suffer from scaling and cost challenges that can compromise the stability of production systems. In addition, they face a challenging trade-off: To unlock production data for analytics, they create performance bottlenecks for operational access, putting mission-critical databases at risk the moment agents are unleashed in production. These approaches attempt to solve the problem using traditional object stores for database storage. While this enables analytical access that can help some agents, the underlying databases are too slow for production workloads, suffering from up to an order of magnitude higher I/O latency. Page caching layers are at best a patch; the caches themselves are often still not fast enough, and they pose a scalability bottleneck that is easily saturated by agentic workloads. When active multi-agent systems execute dense reasoning cycles, they trigger highly concurrent, unpredictable bursts of queries that overwhelm these caching layers, leaving mission-critical production systems vulnerable to agent-induced outages. Consequently, an entire class of operational use cases are precluded from running on these architectures, locking businesses out of the transformative power of AI on live enterprise data. AlloyDB’s unique agentic PostgreSQL architecture We are taking a different approach. AlloyDB delivers an agentic database architecture purpose-built for the AI era, with four key differentiated capabilities: - Sub-millisecond I/O latency, without artificial choke points: Combining AlloyDB’s industry-leading transaction and query processing with low-latency object storage backed by Google’s planet-scale Colossus storage infrastructure, this architecture provides a large-scale, shared storage plane for agents. It achieves sub-millisecond I/O and over a terabit-per-second of aggregate scan bandwidth, allowing agents to execute intensive read queries and vector searches directly against fresh operational data. - Fully isolated from production workloads while scaling to meet demand: AlloyDB scales by dynamically provisioning sandboxed database instances in seconds against fresh production data. Unlike traditional architectures where agents compete for operational resources, agentic database compute remains completely isolated from the primary database clusters — allowing agents to execute dense, unpredictable reasoning loops without degrading performance in production. These robust safety guardrails, coupled with enterprise-grade governance and fine-grained access control, allow you to confidently unleash the full, unconstrained power of PostgreSQL on your production data — seamlessly mixing analytical queries, vector queries, and operational point lookups in active agentic loops. - Pay-as-you-go billing: Most agent activity is characterized by sharp spikes of concurrent queries followed by periods of inactivity. Provisioning dedicated read replicas to absorb these bursts forces you to maintain expensive infrastructure around the clock. To support massive groups of agents cost-effectively, and eliminate the idle compute overhead of provisioned systems, these agentic AlloyDB instances can rapidly scale to handle millions of queries per second, and automatically scale to zero with a flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing model. - Native lakehouse integration, without ETL: All production data is natively integrated with Google Cloud’s borderless Lakehouse. This allows agents to run federated queries across BigQuery and Lightning Engine for Apache Spark, joining massive lakehouse datasets with up-to-the-second transactional data in AlloyDB. This eliminates the need to build and maintain fragile batch ETL pipelines, giving autonomous agents instant access to both live operational state and historical lakehouse context. “As supply chains become increasingly autonomous, our platform relies on real-time transactional intelligence to coordinate complex logistics workflows across thousands of facilities. AlloyDB's new PostgreSQL architecture for agents has been a game changer for us. We can now deploy networks of agents collaborating simultaneously to help us analyze inventory and order data with sub-second freshness, while ensuring our core transactional processing remains entirely untouched. It delivers the isolation, speed, and cost efficiency we need to power the next generation of enterprise supply chain AI.” - Sanjeev Siotia, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Manhattan Associates Availability PostgreSQL for agents in AlloyDB is now available in preview. To learn more, visit the documentation page, and sign up here to get started.
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