Why wouldn't we just give the agent read permission on a replica db? Wouldn't that be enough for the agent to know about:

- what tables are there

- table schemas and relationships

Based on that, the agent could easily query the tables to extract info. Not sure why we need a "framework" for this.

Disclaimer: I don't know the details of how this works.

Time-to-solution and quality would be my guess. In my experience, adding high level important details about the way information is organized to the beginning of the context and then explaining the tools to further explore schema or access data produces much more consistent results rather than each inference having to query the system and build its own world view before trying to figure out how to answer your query and then doing it.

It's a bit like giving you a book or giving you that book without the table of contents and no index, but you you can do basic text search over the whole thing.

Because you also need proper access controls. In many cases database access is too low level, you need to bring it up a layer or two to know who can access what. Even more so when you want to do more than read data.