What the Heck is SmithDB?
From Tech Stories Tech Brief By HackerNoon by HackerNoon
May 28, 2026 · 8 min
About this episode
This episode discusses SmithDB, a new database developed by LangChain for AI applications.
This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/what-the-heck-is-smithdb . SmithDB from LangChain is a new style of database in the AI world. Check more stories related to tech-stories at: https://hackernoon.com/c/tech-stories . You can also check exclusive content about #smithdb , #datafusion , #vortex , #data-engineering , #what-is-smithdb , #langchain-built-smithdb , #agent-observability , #general-purpose-database , and more. This story was written by: @progrockrec . Learn more about this writer by checking @progrockrec's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com . LangChain built SmithDB, a purpose-built distributed database in Rust that now powers LangSmith's agent observability. Modern AI agent traces have gotten too big and complex for general-purpose databases, with hundreds of nested spans, multi-modal content, and spans that stay open for hours. SmithDB uses an object-storage-backed LSM architecture built on Apache DataFusion and the Vortex file format, delivering P50 latencies of 92ms for trace tree loads and making LangSmith up to 15x faster. It is not a standalone product you install; it is the new data layer behind…
Topics covered
- AI databases
- LangChain
- data engineering
- agent observability
- SmithDB
Keywords
- SmithDB
- LangChain
- data fusion
- agent observability
- general-purpose database
- Rust
- latency
- tracing
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: LangChain, LangSmith, Apache DataFusion
Products: SmithDB, Vortex
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