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Insights on AI infrastructure, Decision Coherence, and building systems for the machine-driven era.

From Context Engineering to Context Infrastructure

Context engineering has become the defining discipline of AI agent development. But the conversation is missing a layer. Techniques for structuring context are well-understood. The infrastructure that makes context complete, consistent, and current at decision time is not.

Alex KimballMar 19, 202614 min read

Latest Articles

61 articles

Architecture

Polyglot Persistence and the Retrieval Gap: Why Multiple Databases Break Real-Time Decisions

Polyglot persistence solved database specialization. It also made it structurally impossible for a single decision to read consistent context across stores — and no amount of pipeline tuning can fix it.

Alex Kimball|Mar 31, 2026

AI Infrastructure

ACID for Agents: Why Database Consistency Is the Bottleneck for Production AI

Oracle just validated what production agent teams already know: the agent data layer is broken. Here's why ACID compliance across retrieval patterns is the fix.

Xiaowei Jiang|Mar 27, 2026

Data Engineering

Redis Alternatives: 9 Options for Caching, Real-Time Data, and Decision Workloads

Redis changed its license. The ecosystem fractured. Here are 9 alternatives — from drop-in forks to architecturally different systems — organized by what you're actually trying to solve.

Alex Kimball|Mar 25, 2026

Data Engineering

Apache Doris vs ClickHouse: Choosing a Real-Time Analytics Database

Apache Doris and ClickHouse are both columnar OLAP databases built for real-time analytics. Here's how they compare on architecture, joins, real-time ingestion, and consistency — and where both hit the same structural limit for decision workloads.

Alex Kimball|Mar 24, 2026

Data Engineering

Incremental Materialized View: How to Keep Derived State Fresh in Real Time

Standard materialized views recompute everything on a schedule. Incremental materialized views apply only the delta — continuously, as data changes. Here's how they work across Postgres, ClickHouse, Databricks, and streaming databases, what each approach can and can't do, and where they all hit the same structural limit.

Alex Kimball|Mar 24, 2026

Data Engineering

CQRS for AI Agents: Why Eventual Consistency Breaks Autonomous Systems

CQRS separates reads from writes. But when AI agents become the read-side consumer, eventual consistency becomes a correctness problem. Here's what changes.

Boyd Stowe|Mar 20, 2026

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