According to an Alibaba Cloud community post published on 30 October, new ApsaraDB RDS for PostgreSQL instances grew by more than 400% over the past year, roughly 80% of them were created by agents, and agent-driven access traffic is approaching half of total database traffic. The post uses that shift to argue that database security assumptions built around human accounts no longer hold, and describes a control set along four boundaries: per-agent identity and scoped tokens enforced at a gateway that keeps database credentials out of the agent; inspection of agent inputs, tool calls, outputs and sessions by a product the post calls DataGuard for Agent, in free public preview, which can intercept high-risk operations rather than only log them; periodic anomaly and risk summaries from a database assistant; and data-layer encryption, access control and backup. It also points to adjacent products for credential management, data-leak detection and cloud configuration, and states that coverage across those products is needed because credentials are scattered across code, configuration files and agent memory.
Our takeThe number to interrogate is the 80%: the post gives no method for separating an agent from an ordinary automated client, so treat it as a vendor's own classification rather than a measured share. The architecture is the testable part: identity per agent at a proxy, row- and column-scoped permissions, and credentials kept out of the agent's context, which moves enforcement out of the prompt. Whether it holds depends on every access path passing through that gateway, which the post's own cross-product list implicitly concedes.