What the Heck is SmithDB?

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SmithDB from LangChain is a new style of database in the AI world.
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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 LangSmith, and it is already serving 100% of US Cloud ingestion and tracing UI traffic.