Category: vpdb

This is a continuation of my previous post, which can be found here.

Let us recap the key takaways from our previous post –

Agentic AI refers to autonomous systems that pursue goals with minimal supervision by planning, reasoning about next steps, utilizing tools, and maintaining context across sessions. Core capabilities include goal-directed autonomy, interaction with tools and environments (e.g., APIs, databases, devices), multi-step planning and reasoning under uncertainty, persistence, and choiceful decision-making.

Architecturally, three modules coordinate intelligent behavior: Sensing (perception pipelines that acquire multimodal data, extract salient patterns, and recognize entities/events); Observation/Deliberation (objective setting, strategy formation, and option evaluation relative to resources and constraints); and Action (execution via software interfaces, communications, or physical actuation to deliver outcomes). These functions are enabled by machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing, planning/decision-making, uncertainty reasoning, and simulation/modeling.

At enterprise scale, open standards align autonomy with governance: the Model Context Protocol (MCP) grants an agent secure, principled access to enterprise tools and data (vertical integration), while Agent-to-Agent (A2A) enables specialized agents to coordinate, delegate, and exchange information (horizontal collaboration). Together, MCP and A2A help organizations transition from isolated pilots to scalable programs, delivering end-to-end automation, faster integration, enhanced security and auditability, vendor-neutral interoperability, and adaptive problem-solving that responds to real-time context.

Great! Let’s dive into this topic now.

Enterprise AI with MCP refers to the application of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard, to enable AI systems to securely and consistently access external enterprise data and applications. 

The problem MCP solves in enterprise AI:

Before MCP, enterprise AI integration was characterized by a “many-to-many” or “N x M” problem. Companies had to build custom, fragile, and costly integrations between each AI model and every proprietary data source, which was not scalable. These limitations left AI agents with limited, outdated, or siloed information, restricting their potential impact. 
MCP addresses this by offering a standardized architecture for AI and data systems to communicate with each other.

How does MCP work?

The MCP framework uses a client-server architecture to enable communication between AI models and external tools and data sources. 

• MCP Host: The AI-powered application or environment, such as an AI-enhanced IDE or a generative AI chatbot like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, where the user interacts.
• MCP Client: A component within the host application that manages the connection to MCP servers.
• MCP Server: A lightweight service that wraps around an external system (e.g., a CRM, database, or API) and exposes its capabilities to the AI client in a standardized format, typically using JSON-RPC 2.0. 

An MCP server provides AI clients with three key resources: 

• Resources: Structured or unstructured data that an AI can access, such as files, documents, or database records.
• Tools: The functionality to perform specific actions within an external system, like running a database query or sending an email.
• Prompts: Pre-defined text templates or workflows to help guide the AI’s actions. 

Benefits of MCP for enterprise AI:

• Standardized integration: Developers can build integrations against a single, open standard, which dramatically reduces the complexity and time required to deploy and scale AI initiatives.
• Enhanced security and governance: MCP incorporates native support for security and compliance measures. It provides permission models, access control, and auditing capabilities to ensure AI systems only access data and tools within specified boundaries.
• Real-time contextual awareness: By connecting AI agents to live enterprise data sources, MCP ensures they have access to the most current and relevant information, which reduces hallucinations and improves the accuracy of AI outputs.
• Greater interoperability: MCP is model-agnostic & can be used with a variety of AI models (e.g., Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s models) and across different cloud environments. This approach helps enterprises avoid vendor lock-in.
• Accelerated development: The “build once, integrate everywhere” approach enables internal teams to focus on innovation instead of writing custom connectors for every system.

Flow of activities:

Let us understand one sample case & the flow of activities.

A customer support agent uses an AI assistant to get information about a customer’s recent orders. The AI assistant utilizes an MCP-compliant client to communicate with an MCP server, which is connected to the company’s PostgreSQL database.

The interaction flow:

1. User request: The support agent asks the AI assistant, “What was the most recent order placed by Priyanka Chopra Jonas?”

2. AI model processes intent: The AI assistant, running on an MCP host, analyzes the natural language query. It recognizes that to answer this question, it needs to perform a database query. It then identifies the appropriate tool from the MCP server’s capabilities. 

3. Client initiates tool call: The AI assistant’s MCP client sends a JSON-RPC request to the MCP server connected to the PostgreSQL database. The request specifies the tool to be used, such as get_customer_orders, and includes the necessary parameters: 

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "method": "db_tools.get_customer_orders",
  "params": {
    "customer_name": "Priyanka Chopra Jonas",
    "sort_by": "order_date",
    "sort_order": "desc",
    "limit": 1
  },
  "id": "12345"
}

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "method": "db_tools.get_customer_orders",
  "params": {
    "customer_name": "Priyanka Chopra Jonas",
    "sort_by": "order_date",
    "sort_order": "desc",
    "limit": 1
  },
  "id": "12345"
}

4. Server handles the request: The MCP server receives the request and performs several key functions: 

• Authentication and authorization: The server verifies that the AI client and the user have permission to query the database.
• Query translation: The server translates the standardized MCP request into a specific SQL query for the PostgreSQL database.
• Query execution: The server executes the SQL query against the database.

SELECT order_id, order_date, total_amount
FROM orders
WHERE customer_name = 'Priyanka Chopra Jonas'
ORDER BY order_date DESC
LIMIT 1;

SELECT order_id, order_date, total_amount
FROM orders
WHERE customer_name = 'Priyanka Chopra Jonas'
ORDER BY order_date DESC
LIMIT 1;

5. Database returns data: The PostgreSQL database executes the query and returns the requested data to the MCP server. 

6. Server formats the response: The MCP server receives the raw database output and formats it into a standardized JSON response that the MCP client can understand.

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "result": {
    "data": [
      {
        "order_id": "98765",
        "order_date": "2025-08-25",
        "total_amount": 11025.50
      }
    ]
  },
  "id": "12345"
}

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "result": {
    "data": [
      {
        "order_id": "98765",
        "order_date": "2025-08-25",
        "total_amount": 11025.50
      }
    ]
  },
  "id": "12345"
}

7. Client returns data to the model: The MCP client receives the JSON response and passes it back to the AI assistant’s language model. 

8. AI model generates final response: The language model incorporates this real-time data into its response and presents it to the user in a natural, conversational format. 

“Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s most recent order was placed on August 25, 2025, with an order ID of 98765, for a total of $11025.50.”

What are the performance implications of using MCP for database access?

Using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for database access introduces a layer of abstraction that affects performance in several ways. While it adds some latency and processing overhead, strategic implementation can mitigate these effects. For AI applications, the benefits often outweigh the costs, particularly in terms of improved accuracy, security, and scalability.

Sources of performance implications::

Added latency and processing overhead:

The MCP architecture introduces extra communication steps between the AI agent and the database, each adding a small amount of latency. 

• RPC overhead: The JSON-RPC call from the AI’s client to the MCP server adds a small processing and network delay. This is an out-of-process request, as opposed to a simple local function call.
• JSON serialization: Request and response data must be serialized and deserialized into JSON format, which requires processing time.
• Network transit: For remote MCP servers, the data must travel over the network, adding latency. However, for a local or on-premise setup, this is minimal. The physical location of the MCP server relative to the AI model and the database is a significant factor.

Scalability and resource consumption:

The performance impact scales with the complexity and volume of the AI agent’s interactions. 

• High request volume: A single AI agent working on a complex task might issue dozens of parallel database queries. In high-traffic scenarios, managing numerous simultaneous connections can strain system resources and require robust infrastructure.
• Excessive data retrieval: A significant performance risk is an AI agent retrieving a massive dataset in a single query. This process can consume a large number of tokens, fill the AI’s context window, and cause bottlenecks at the database and client levels.
• Context window usage: Tool definitions and the results of tool calls consume space in the AI’s context window. If a large number of tools are in use, this can limit the AI’s “working memory,” resulting in slower and less effective reasoning. 

Optimizations for high performance::

Caching:

Caching is a crucial strategy for mitigating the performance overhead of MCP. 

• In-memory caching: The MCP server can cache results from frequent or expensive database queries in memory (e.g., using Redis or Memcached). This approach enables repeat requests to be served almost instantly without requiring a database hit.
• Semantic caching: Advanced techniques can cache the results of previous queries and serve them for semantically similar future requests, reducing token consumption and improving speed for conversational applications. 

Efficient queries and resource management:

Designing the MCP server and its database interactions for efficiency is critical. 

• Optimized SQL: The MCP server should generate optimized SQL queries. Database indexes should be utilized effectively to expedite lookups and minimize load.
• Pagination and filtering: To prevent a single query from overwhelming the system, the MCP server should implement pagination. The AI agent can be prompted to use filtering parameters to retrieve only the necessary data.
• Connection pooling: This technique reuses existing database connections instead of opening a new one for each request, thereby reducing latency and database load. 

Load balancing and scaling:

For large-scale enterprise deployments, scaling is essential for maintaining performance. 

• Multiple servers: The workload can be distributed across various MCP servers. One server could handle read requests, and another could handle writes.
• Load balancing: A reverse proxy or other load-balancing solution can distribute incoming traffic across MCP server instances. Autoscaling can dynamically add or remove servers in response to demand.

The performance trade-off in perspective:

For AI-driven tasks, a slight increase in latency for database access is often a worthwhile trade-off for significant gains. 

• Improved accuracy: Accessing real-time, high-quality data through MCP leads to more accurate and relevant AI responses, reducing “hallucinations”.
• Scalable ecosystem: The standardization of MCP reduces development overhead and allows for a more modular, scalable ecosystem, which saves significant engineering resources compared to building custom integrations.
• Decoupled architecture: The MCP server decouples the AI model from the database, allowing each to be optimized and scaled independently. 

We’ll go ahead and conclude this post here & continue discussing on a further deep dive in the next post.

Till then, Happy Avenging! 🙂

Note: All the data & scenarios posted here are representational data & scenarios & available over the internet & for educational purposes only. There is always room for improvement in this kind of model & the solution associated with it. I’ve shown the basic ways to achieve the same for educational purposes only.