Why is database support missing?

[deepyes02]

Hello,

Maybe this is intentional, but I noticed strands_agent is missing database support and stores sessions in local file system. While working in a langGraph project, I noticed it has native postgresql support.

I'm wondering why this design choice was made, and if filesystem storage is better than database ? Or maybe it's upto developers to implement a database support system. Please feel free to share your thoughts & guidance.

[awsarron]

Hi @deepyes02, thanks for reaching out.

@Unshure posted some information about this at #33 (comment).

Hi @puritatemcordis , I wanted to reach out here with an update that we recently shipped a session manager as part of this Feature Request: #246

I saw that in this feature request, you are specifically asking for a relational database session manager instead of a file based approach like we took. The reason we decided to use files over a relational database is that the content in an agentic conversation can be quite large, and may not fit easily into the rows of a database.

Our team has though about creating a hybrid session manager, where the conversation metadata is stored in a database, while the conversation content is stored in files to help mitigate potential latency concerns related to a file-only based session manager.

I was wondering if the approach that we took with the file based session manager addresses the issues you raised in this Feature request, or if you still need some functionality specifically out of a relational database backed session manager?

It boils down to agent tool calls, tool results, and multi-modal context either not being possible to store in a specific database, or overflowing maximum row sizes.

[deepyes02]

Hi @awsarron , thanks for replying.

However, some integration with database would be kind of necessary to store data somewhere don't you think ? Or maybe it's better to let it up to the developer on how to handle the data.

As user interactions grow, I think file based data storage might create a lot of maintenance and speed problems.