From Context to Memory: Your Agents Need a Real Memory Layer — Anders Swanson, Oracle

Your agent rereads the same files every session because nothing it learned was saved. Anders Swanson, developer evangelist for Oracle Database, treats agent memory as a systems problem. Context windows aren't memory, bigger windows aren't the fix, and markdown scratch pads and grep don't scale. Keep going down that road and you'll end up building your own database. He walks through the pattern modern memory systems are converging on: formation, recall, evolution and evaluation, plus governance. That means typed memories (episodic, semantic, procedural and working state), a storage schema with vectors, text indexes, graph links, time and audit history, redaction before anything is written, and hybrid search that blends several retrieval methods. He covers failure modes like stale, mis-scoped, poisoned and conflicting memories, and why feedback is what closes the loop. In this talk: • Why context windows and scratch files aren't memory • Typed memories and a storage schema built for recall • Forming memories safely, and recalling them with hybrid search • Stale, poisoned and conflicting memories, and how feedback fixes them SPEAKER Anders Swanson, Developer Evangelist, Oracle Database Oracle blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/authors/anders-swanson/ LINKS Oracle Agent Memory (Python SDK): https://pypi.org/project/oracleagentmemory/ Agent memory docs: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/agent-memory/index.html Oracle AI Developer Hub: https://github.com/oracle-devrel/oracle-ai-developer-hub CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:47 Agents reread the same files 0:57 Context windows aren't memory 1:52 Bigger windows aren't the fix 2:07 Scratch pads don't scale 2:47 Just use a database 3:07 Formation, recall, evolution, evaluation 4:17 Governance controls 4:37 The memory loop 5:27 Read, write and storage layers 5:57 Why multi-model databases 6:22 Four types of memory 7:17 The storage schema 8:17 Forming memories: redact first 10:02 Recall with hybrid search 11:27 Blending search methods 12:17 Memories must evolve 12:32 Stale, poisoned and conflicting memory 15:27 Feedback closes the loop 16:22 Why it matters 17:07 Try the SDK Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aidotengineer/ #AgentMemory #AIAgents #AIEngineer