Alex Merced's Data, Dev and AI Blog

Topic

MCP

28 posts tagged “MCP”.

  1. 30 min read

    Securing the Agentic Lakehouse Gateway: Preventing Prompt Injection and Data Exfiltration

    A support agent is asked to summarize the last five tickets from a customer. It queries the tickets table through an MCP server connected to the…

  2. 30 min read

    The Five Layers of an Agentic Lakehouse

    Every architecture era gets its reference diagram. The warehouse era had its star schemas and its staging-to-mart flow. The big data era had its…

  3. 32 min read

    Securing the Agentic Lakehouse Gateway: A Threat Model for Prompt Injection, Exfiltration, and the Firewall That Reads Sentences

    My article on building stateless tool gateways ended with a promise deferred: the gateway is where agent traffic converges, which makes it where…

  4. 31 min read

    Building Stateless AI Tool Gateways with FastMCP, the 2026 MCP Spec, and Kubernetes

    The gap between an agent demo and an agent platform is an infrastructure gap, and it has a specific shape. The demo runs one MCP server on a laptop,…

  5. 20 min read

    The Five Layers of an Agentic Lakehouse and Where the MCP Server Sits

    Someone on your team connects an AI desktop client to a query engine, asks a question about last quarter, and gets an answer in fifteen seconds. It…

  6. 20 min read

    Why Agentic AI Needs a Governed Semantic Layer Behind the Model Context Protocol

    An executive asks an AI assistant what revenue looked like last quarter. The assistant writes SQL against the warehouse, sums an amount column, and…

  7. 20 min read

    Moving From Supply Chain Dashboards to Decision Loops With the Model Context Protocol

    A supply chain control tower shows a red tile. A supplier's on-time delivery rate dropped below threshold four days ago. The tile has been red for…

  8. 20 min read

    Defending the Lakehouse Gateway Against Prompt Injection and Data Exfiltration

    A support ticket contains a customer's message. Somewhere in that message is a sentence addressed to nobody who works at your company: ignore your…

  9. 30 min read

    Wiring an AI Agent to Apache Polaris with the Model Context Protocol

    An engineer opens Cursor, types "what tables do we have in the sales namespace, and which ones have a customerid column," and gets an answer in four…

  10. 18 min read

    GSA MCP Servers for Open Data AI Agents

    The U.S. government publishes hundreds of thousands of datasets through Data.gov and agency portals, and almost none of them are shaped for an AI…

  11. 17 min read

    MCP Stateless Gateways for Data Agents

    A Model Context Protocol server that holds session state in memory is a server you cannot scale by adding replicas. The moment one process remembers…

  12. 29 min read

    The State of Agentic AI Standards in 2026: MCP, A2A, WebMCP, OSI, and the Protocol Stack Taking Shape

    In 2023, an AI agent was a demo. In 2024, it was a framework. In 2025, it was a hundred incompatible frameworks. And in 2026, something genuinely new…

  13. 18 min read

    Conversational AI on Managed Iceberg: Exposing Amazon S3 Tables through MCP

    The most interesting part of conversational analytics is not the chat box. The chat box is just the surface area. The harder question is what happens…

  14. 26 min read

    Designing Your Own AI Harness: A Deep Dive Into the Architecture of Agent Loops, Tools, Context, and Control

    The most underappreciated finding in applied AI this year fits in one statistic: a major framework team took the same model, changed nothing about…

  15. 15 min read

    The 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol Release Candidate: What the Stateless Spec Means for Data Platforms

    The date in this topic matters. Today is July 6, 2026. A release candidate dated July 28, 2026 is still in the future. That means this article should…

  16. 14 min read

    Implementing MCP in the Lakehouse

    MCP gives AI clients a standard way to call governed lakehouse tools instead of guessing how to query your data. That is the useful lens for MCP…

  17. 16 min read

    Data Platform Native AI Agent Tooling in 2026

    Every data platform vendor now offers some form of AI agent tooling. The approaches vary widely, from full agent authoring frameworks to MCP server…

  18. 5 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 10 - Sampling and Prompts in MCP – Making Agent Workflows Smarter and Safer

    Sampling and Prompts in MCP – Making Agent Workflows Smarter and Safer

  19. 5 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 9 - Tools in MCP – Giving LLMs the Power to Act

    Tools in MCP – Giving LLMs the Power to Act

  20. 4 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 8 - Resources in MCP – Serving Relevant Data Securely to LLMs

    Resources in MCP – Serving Relevant Data Securely to LLMs

  21. 5 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 7 - Under the Hood – The Architecture of MCP and Its Core Components

    Under the Hood – The Architecture of MCP and Its Core Components

  22. 5 min read

    Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 6 - Enter the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – The Interoperability Layer for AI Agents

    Enter the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – The Interoperability Layer for AI Agents

  23. 8 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 5 - AI Agent Frameworks – Benefits and Limitations

    AI Agent Frameworks – Benefits and Limitations

  24. 5 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 4 - What Are AI Agents – And Why They're the Future of LLM Applications

    What Are AI Agents – And Why They're the Future of LLM Applications

  25. 5 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 3 - Boosting LLM Performance – Fine-Tuning, Prompt Engineering, and RAG

    Boosting LLM Performance – Fine-Tuning, Prompt Engineering, and RAG

  26. 5 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 2 - How LLMs Work – Embeddings, Vectors, and Context Windows

    How LLMs Work – Embeddings, Vectors, and Context Windows

  27. 4 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 1 - What Is AI and How It Evolved Into LLMs

    What Is AI and How It Evolved Into LLMs

  28. 15 min read

    Building a Basic MCP Server with Python

    The Basics of Building a Basic MCP Server

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