CockroachDB for agentic workloads

Why this conversation

Agents do not query a database the way people do. They work around the clock, many at once, and the load arrives in peaks. For anyone running the data layer under agentic systems, that raises an old question in a new form: which database can take that pressure and stay consistent? At AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe in Amsterdam the host sat down with Ugo Pollio, Director of Sales Engineering at Cockroach Labs, who leads its solution engineering and customer success teams, a few days after the company announced Continuum.

The story of the week it was filmed is in AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026: who we met.

Critical workloads, and now agentic ones

CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database whose goal is to support every business-critical workload. It provides SQL and fits the OLTP scenario. For critical systems such as payments, trading, massive transactional workloads and gambling, it guarantees consistent transactions through its ACID properties.

Continuum, announced a couple of days before the conversation, is the evolution of Cockroach: the engine behind it is the same CockroachDB. Alongside business-critical workloads, the focus now includes agentic workloads, which Ugo sees more and more, including at the event. Agents are already hitting databases. Because they are not human, they work 24/7 and concurrently, and with many agents in production the pressure gets very high. Consistency and continuity for an agentic framework need a database that is reliable, and that scales for the peaks.

The database is not just another component in AI work, he says, but one of the core ones. An agent workflow has metadata, state and logs that must persist somewhere. He mentions growth in quantitative finance and among AI companies, and customers in the field where it has already proved a fit.

Vectors next to the transactions

Vector support is an important feature, and CockroachDB has it, which enables embeddings and retrieval. The advantage many customers found is that they do not have to pull their business transactions out of the database and move them somewhere else to build the embeddings.

His starting point is to think of every business process as business events, persisted as transactions in a database. In many cases that is the primary source of data for AI, because it is reliable. So why move the data elsewhere, when the work can be done inside the database with its guarantees of scale and resilience?

Virtual clusters without noisy neighbours

The host asked about virtual databases. Virtual clusters, Ugo says, are where Continuum is heading, and they reflect what Cockroach has seen with customers over the last couple of years: consumption of storage and compute at a level not seen before, and a possible scarcity of compute. The question becomes how to get the most out of existing infrastructure.

Virtual clusters bring two benefits. They share infrastructure, so compute is used well without large idle capacity, and they can be created and scaled quickly. At the same time each customer’s clusters stay in a private environment, because segregation and isolation matter, in hybrid environments too. And they avoid noisy neighbours, so performance for the daily business is guaranteed.

Compliance and central banks

Asked about regulation and sovereignty in Europe, Ugo said Cockroach checks the compliance and regulatory requirements in the market and works on the technology to meet them. Technically that includes encryption, including for the communication between nodes, so that no data is exposed. The practical proof, he says, is the customers: some of the largest in the financial sector, and some central banks in Europe, which use CockroachDB to manage transactions across different central banks.

Getting in touch

The easiest way in is cockroachlabs.com, with documentation, examples, blogs and customer use cases, and people in different European countries, with a presence in London. Cockroach University is the place to learn the technology and get certified. RoachFest events always include hands-on workshops; the host attended the event in London, with a hands-on morning workshop and plenty of code. Ugo also named customers that show the value of the database: SpaceX, Roblox, DoorDash and Booking.com.