The database industry is repeating a historical cycle where specialized systems create fragmentation that demands convergence. As AI agents become primary data consumers, organizations face a new challenge: context silos, where information exists but cannot be retrieved fast enough for autonomous systems to act effectively.

Apache Doris 4.1 introduces comprehensive Iceberg V3 support, enabling reads, writes (UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE INTO), DDL operations, table maintenance, and diagnostics entirely through SQL without switching to other tools.

This guide covers three critical decisions for production RAG systems: chunk shaping, embedding selection, and ANN index scaling, bridging the gap between demo retrieval and real-scale deployments.