SurrealDB Agent Memory stores authoritative and experiential knowledge in one SurrealDB graph. The eight pillars, especially Authoritative and Experiential, show up as records and edges, not as two databases.
One multi-model SurrealDB substrate - documents, turns, entities, attributes, relations, embeddings, traces, and (where enabled) geometry - with provenance explaining which stream produced a record and reconciliation deciding how streams combine.
"Layers" are still a useful picture for authority: curated organisational truth versus conversational input. Both streams are records and edges in the same database, updated under ACID transactions.
Two streams of truth (not two databases)
| Stream | Typical source.kind | What it holds | Default trust |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authoritative | document (and operator upsert) | Manuals, policies, product data, repos, structured exports | High - vetted sources |
| Experiential | turn, plus reflect, elaboration, consolidation, … | What users and agents said; synthesised or background-minted facts | Lower - must earn promotion |
Retrieval, elaboration, and consolidation see one entity / relation graph. Hybrid rankers fuse vectors, BM25, graph structure, keyword bridges, geo predicates, and trace-derived features without cross-store joins. A question like "semantically close to X, mentioning Y, linked to entity Z, valid as of last March" is one query over one engine.
How authority is enforced
When an experiential assertion disagrees with authoritative material, the reconciler:
Does not silently overwrite curated records.
Records the experiential assertion with provenance intact.
Surfaces
uncertainty(and/or conflict metadata) so you can see the gap.
That is how the Authoritative pillar wins over casual assertions: authority is a reconciliation policy, not a second copy of the universe hidden in another engine.
Why this matters
Transactions across “what the user said” and “what the handbook says” can be reasoned about together.
Contradictions become first-class records you can query, not cosine-distance accidents.
Traces link decisions back to the sources considered.
Related reading
Authority when pillars meet - how curated and experiential streams interact in APIs today