Beyond Vector Databases: Building a Unified Data Layer for AI Agents
Vector search helps AI agents find relevant information, but building a useful agent often requires more than similarity search. Agents also need access to structured records, relationships between entities, conversation history, and persistent state across sessions.
Supporting these needs can mean connecting several databases and writing code to keep them synchronized. As the application grows, managing that data infrastructure becomes a significant engineering challenge.
Join Farhan Syah, founder of NodeDB, for a free technical workshop hosted by To Data & Beyond, exploring how a unified data layer can support the retrieval, memory, and context requirements of AI agents.
Using NodeDB as a practical example, we’ll explore how vector search, graph relationships, document storage, and other data capabilities can work together within one system—and the trade-offs involved in choosing this architecture.
What we’ll cover
Where vector search fits—and where it falls short: Understanding the different types of information agents need to retrieve and maintain.
The challenges of a fragmented data stack: How separate databases introduce synchronization work, additional latency, and operational complexity.
Designing a unified data layer: Bringing semantic search, relationships, documents, and application state together.
Retrieving richer context: Combining vector similarity, keyword search, metadata filters, and graph relationships.
Choosing an architecture for your workload: Evaluating when a unified approach makes sense and when specialized systems remain useful.
This workshop is for AI engineers, data engineers, backend developers, and practitioners building RAG applications or agents that need persistent memory and access to multiple types of data.
About the speaker
Farhan Syah is the founder of NodeDB, a database built in Rust for AI and modern application workloads. His work focuses on AI systems, database architecture, and machine learning infrastructure.