Stop building agent memory systems on top of vector databases. You're setting your team up for failure. Vector RAG looks elegant in demos. Pass a query, get back similar chunks, stuff them into context. Done. But when you scale to multiple agents collaborating over time? It collapses. Hard. Here's why: RAG conflates retrieval with reconciliation. It assumes all knowledge is additive. That conflicts don't exist. That agents won't overwrite each other. They do. They will. What you actually need isn't retrieval —it's merge . Not "find me something like this." It's "here's my view of the world, now let's reconcile it with yours." Enter: versioned SQL. Not just any SQL. Think Git, but for structured data. Records have hashes. Changes form a DAG. Conflicts are resolved through explicit merges. History is preserved, not flattened. Retrieval ≠ Reconciliation In RAG, vectors are stateless snapshots. Embeddings encode meaning at a point in time. But they can't tell you how that meaning evolved. Or where it came from.…