The forecast this session opens with is over 1.3 billion AI agents in production by 2028, offered with the suggestion that it may be conservative. Treated as a claim about connection counts rather than a market prediction it becomes useful: the thing on the other end of a database connection is increasingly something that decided moments ago it needed storage. Provisioning latency, a background annoyance for twenty years, becomes a hard dependency in an automated build, and maintenance that presupposes a human operator who scheduled a window no longer fits. The customer migration that grounds the abstraction — eight engineers moving four and a half petabytes in under 120 days — is credible mainly because it ran between closely related products, which is the honest caveat. The optimiser improvement buried at the end matters more than it looks, because an agent writing its own queries has hand-tuned none of them.