Futures Forum: Agents & Data Meetup

## Please note - to reserve a spot for this webinar you must register at: https://sdb.li/4tIXaBo

Architecting Agentic Data Planes: Lessons from OpenAI’s Billion Dollar Postgres Mistake

OpenAI’s PostgreSQL scaling story is impressive engineering. It’s also a cautionary tale.

Agentic AI systems introduce high write concurrency, bursty traffic patterns, and blended transactional + retrieval workloads. Traditional database architectures weren’t designed for this shape.

In this live webinar, we'll break down:

• The architectural constraints that surface at scale
• The operational cost of “just making it work”
• Why AI workloads magnify single-writer bottlenecks
• What a natively distributed, horizontally scalable data plane looks like
• How to serve transactional and AI workloads from one live dataset - without duct tape

​Speaker

Matthew Penaroza
Head of Solution Architecture, SurrealDB
​Matthew Penaroza is Head of Solution Architecture at SurrealDB, where he helps design and scale distributed AI systems for global enterprises. As the solutions architect behind the core database systems at companies such as Plaid, Uber, and Atlassian, he brings firsthand insight into how the world’s largest organizations design data infrastructure and how those same architectural principles can be applied to AI systems that demand context precision and intelligent data management.

## *Please note - to be admitted to this event you must register for approval here: https://luma.com/lcsqwmf3

This weekend hackathon brings together LangChain and SurrealDB to explore how agents can move beyond demos by grounding themselves in structured, persistent context.

As agentic systems become more autonomous, their biggest failure mode isn’t model capability - it’s context. Agents struggle with accuracy, consistency, and reasoning when memory is shallow or unstructured. Knowledge graphs provide a powerful way to represent relationships, state, and history, enabling agents to reason over how things connect, not just what text is retrieved.
Over the weekend, you’ll build practical agent projects using the LangChain ecosystem, with a strong emphasis on knowledge graphs and real-world retrieval workflows, using SurrealDB as a unified data layer for graph, document, vector, and temporal data.
You’ll also have plenty of time to connect with both the LangChain and SurrealDB communities in London, collaborate with other builders, and get hands-on support from mentors.

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## Schedule

Friday

• 18:00 - Doors open, check-in, pizza & drinks
• Hackathon kickoff, team formation & briefing (time TBC)

Saturday

• All day - Build, iterate, mentor support (details TBC)

Sunday

• Final build, demos & judging (details TBC)
• 15:30 - Closing, winners & wrap-up

Full challenge details and rules will be shared ahead of the event.

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## What you’ll work on

• Agent workflows built with LangChain
• Knowledge graph–driven context and memory
• Hybrid retrieval patterns (vector + graph)
• Persistent agent state and evolving context
• Practical, production-oriented agent use cases

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## Prizes

• Swag and LangSmith credits from LangChain
• Swag from SurrealDB

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## Why attend?

This is a hands-on opportunity to build credible agent projects in a single weekend, learn production-oriented patterns, and explore how structured context improves agent accuracy and reliability. You’ll collaborate with experienced builders, get direct support from the LangChain and SurrealDB teams, and connect with the wider London agent and AI engineering community.

FAQs

Is the venue accessible?
Absolutely! There is a lift that takes you up to Level 4 where the event is held.

Is this event for me?
SurrealDB events are for software engineers, developers, architects, data scientists, data engineers, or any tech professionals keen to discover more about SurrealDB: a scalable multi-model database that allows users and developers to focus on building their applications with ease and speed.

Am I guaranteed a ticket at this event?
Our events are tech-focused and in the interest of keeping our events relevant and meaningful for those attending, tickets are issued at our discretion. We therefore reserve the right to refund ticket orders before the event and to request proof of identity and/or professional background upon entry.

Are there any House Rules?
At SurrealDB, we are committed to providing live and online events that are safe and enjoyable for all attending. Please review our Code of Conduct and Privacy Policy for more information. It is compulsory for all attendees to be registered with a first and last name in order to attend. Any attendees who do not adhere to these requirements will be refused a ticket.