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Comment by jsmith99 | Hacker News Reader

I just use a MCP server (with copilot or cline) that has a read only login to my database.

Which is strictly worse than just giving the LLM access to the source of truth for the database.

You're adding a round trip to the database and the LLM and inserting a tool call in the conversation before it even starts generating any code.

And the reference Postgres MCP implementation doesn't include Postgres types or materialized views, and is one of the most widely used packages: Zed.dev's MCP server for example, is seemingly just a port of it and has the same problem.

MCP also gives the LLM access to your example data, which can add clarity beyond what your schema alone provides.

I don't see how a round trip of <500ms, which is equivalent to maybe 50 tokens, is worse than including many thousands more extra tokens in the prompt, just in case they might be useful. Not to mention the context fatigue.

If designed well - by suspending generation in memory and inserting a <function_result>, without restarting generation and fetching cache from disk - the round trip/tool call is better (costs the equivalent of 50 tokens for waiting + function_result tokens).

You're dealing with the full TTFT x2 + the tokens all the prompts of all your MCPs before you even get to that round trip to the DB.

And you don't have to wonder about "if designed well": the reference implementation that's getting 20k downloads a week and getting embedded in downstream editors is is not designed well and will make the round trip every time and still not give the LLM the full information of the table.

Most MCP implementations are crappy half-assed implementations in similar fashion because everyone was rushing to post how they added <insert DB/API/Data Source> to MCP.

And if you're worried about "context fatigue" (you mean LLMs getting distracted by relevant information...), you should 100% prefer a well known schema format to N MCP prompt definitions with tool usage instructions that weren't even necessarily tuned for the LLM in question.

LLMs are much more easily derailed by the addition of extra tools and having to reason about when to call them and the results of calling them, than they are a prompt caching friendly block of tokens with easy to follow meaning.

The schema in the db should be the source of truth and an MCP server like that is the most flexible, can work with any ORM set up

What source of truth? If you have access to the database then you have the actual truth right there.

Out of interest.. does the resultant data get used by the LLM or just generating SQL, executing and returning separately?

PM on the project here - The results from the query are generally not used by the LLM. In agent mode though, during query planning, the agent may retrieve sample of the data to improve precision of the queries. For example, getting distinct values from dimensional table to resolve filter condition from natural language statement.

Thanks. I worry about these kind of tools connecting to production databases.. Especially considering how easy it is to switch out LLM endpoints, where that data is going, how it is retained, the context etc becomes a bit of a privacy nightmare..

Absolutely valid concern. Our extension connects to LLMs through Github Copilot. Github Copilot is Microsoft product and offers variety of enterprise plans, which enables your IT to approve what can be used for what kind of data. This gives you a clear path towards compliance with your enterprise requirements.

Makes sense. Appreciate the responses. Honestly though, as a person outside the US, I'm removing my dependence on US company IT tools and infrastructure, GitHub, VSCode, AWS etc, enterprise or otherwise.. Congrats on the project though.

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