Your agent doesn't remember anything. Persistence isn't memory.

Short summary

Agent memory and persistence are not the same thing. Ed Huang (PingCAP CEO) argues real agent memory requires five layers: persistence, selection, compression, decay, and contamination prevention. A reference schema using SQL with vector embeddings implements episodic and semantic memory tables with read-time decay and contamination invalidation, addressing common production failures in agent systems.

• •Persistence alone doesn't give agents memory—they also need selection, compression, decay, and contamination prevention
• •Most teams conflate idempotency, workflow state, and transactional consistency with memory, which are distinct concerns
• •Combine episodic (what happened) and semantic (distilled knowledge) memory in a single database with confidence decay and invalidation pointers

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