Planet NoSQL

Data Agents: Notes from the VLDB 2026 Panel Data Agents: Rethinking Data Systems in the AI Agent Era Moderators: Guoliang Li (Tsinghua University) · Yuyu Luo (HKUST (Guangzhou)) Panelists: Carsten Binnig (TU Darmstadt) · Samuel Madden (MIT) · Fatma Özcan (Google) · Aditya Parameswaran (UC Berkeley & Snowflake) · Nan Tang (HKUST (Guangzhou)) · Immanuel Trummer (Cornell University) · Eugene Wu (Columbia University) Note: This article is generated from my notes and memory. Raw notes at the end of this article. Hopefully, a video of this panel will be available eventually. I'll update once I see it. Any errors here are mine.  VLDB 2026 hosted a panel titled "Data Agents: Rethinking Data Systems in the AI Agent Era." The panel organized itself around four questions: WHAT is a data agent? An interface, a coding agent, another X-DB — or a new paradigm? WHY is it genuinely different? Better models, or new data-systems abstractions? HOW will it reshape dat...