Databases

Diagram titled 'Safe. Powerful. Direct.' showing an AI agent routed through guardrails (dedicated role, read-only transactions, connection pool, query timeouts) into a read-only schema and read replica, separate from the primary production database.

Seven strategies for safe AI agent database access

Unrestricted database access for AI agents is dangerous. Excessive restrictions defeat the purpose. Here’s how to find the middle ground.

A code card on a yellow background showing DuckDB extensions in action: LOAD azure / postgres / postgres_scanner; ATTACH 'postgresql://...' AS postgres_db (TYPE POSTGRES); CREATE SECRET for Azure with credential_chain; then INSERT INTO postgres_db.users SELECT * FROM read_json_auto('az://users/*.json') JOIN role ON id = role.user_id.

My favourite DuckDB extensions

Three categories of DuckDB extensions I keep reaching for: cloud storage, semi-structured files, and external SQL databases.

Once you go DuckDB

DuckDB is the newest game-changer in data analytics: serverless, just-a-file, and faster than Postgres or SQLite for the analytics queries you actually want to run.