Data Agents: Rethinking Data Systems in the AI Agent Era

Summary: A forward-looking panel reframes data systems around autonomous agents that perceive heterogeneous data, reason over semantics, plan multi-step analyses, and collaborate with users. It identifies open challenges at the intersection of databases, HCI, AI infrastructure, and programming languages. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Aug 28 2026)

Paper ID: h42aec3fcdcd7ea5a
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2026
Pagerank: 4.9793485e-05
Overall Rank: 11,034 | 25.82%
DOI: 10.14778/3827998.3838708

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Guoliang Li (Tsinghua University)
2. Yuyu Luo (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@article{li_vldb26,
        title = {{Data Agents: Rethinking Data Systems in the AI Agent Era}},
        author = {Li, Guoliang and Luo, Yuyu},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '26},
        volume = {19},
        number = {12},
        pages = {4946--4949},
        doi = {10.14778/3827998.3838708},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3827998.3838708},
        year = {2026}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
683	DocETL: Agentic Query Rewriting and Evaluation for Complex Document Processing	2025	VLDB	0.00014817539
748	Palimpzest: Optimizing AI-Powered Analytics with Declarative Query Processing	2025	CIDR	0.00014281926
2,348	The Dawn of Natural Language to SQL: Are We Fully Ready?	2024	VLDB	8.6009821e-05
4,142	AOP: Automated and Interactive LLM Pipeline Orchestration for Answering Complex Queries	2025	CIDR	6.7814795e-05
4,557	Databases Unbound: Querying All of the World’s Bytes with AI	2024	VLDB	6.5356905e-05
5,116	Is Long Context All You Need? Leveraging LLM's Extended Context for NL2SQL	2025	VLDB	6.2678524e-05
5,149	LLM for Data Management	2024	VLDB	6.2551644e-05
5,391	Supporting Our AI Overlords: Redesigning Data Systems to be Agent-First	2026	CIDR	6.1504174e-05
5,501	SemBench: A Benchmark for Semantic Query Processing Engines	2026	VLDB	6.1027188e-05
6,636	Physical Visualization Design: Decoupling Interface and System Design	2025	SIGMOD	5.7262507e-05
7,583	Data Imputation with Limited Data Redundancy Using Data Lakes	2025	VLDB	5.4906208e-05
9,065	A Vision for Autonomous Data Agent Collaboration: From Query-by-Integration to Query-by-Collaboration	2026	CIDR	5.2283159e-05
10,433	DeepEye-SQL: A Software-Engineering-Inspired Text-to-SQL Framework	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,270	Weak-to-Strong Prompts with Lightweight-to-Powerful LLMs for High-Accuracy, Low-Cost, and Explainable Data Transformation	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

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