Direction of the Teradata MCP Community Edition

[dtehan-td]

All,
First, we would like to thank all that have contributed over the last year, we have learnt a heap about what kind of functionality is needed. Second, the agentic space is moving quickly and patterns are changing, we need to change with them. Third, we do this in our spare time and need it to be manageable.

So, we are suggesting moving the MCP server to a light infrastructure that is extensible via custom tools and skills/prompts to manage process. This change will enable a simpler framework to support, whilst making it easier for custom extensions to be developed.

The changes we are suggesting are:

1. Moving to a tool discovery pattern, rather than declaring all tools up front. With the explosion of tools, the context windows have become a problem. We will have explicit tools for a very small selection of tools, everything else implicit and discoverable.

• Selection explicit tools will be done based on usage, we are aiming to have about 5-7 explicit tools.
• Implicit tools will be discovered by the tool_search and tool_execution tools, this ensures that your tools are still available to the LLM, but does not fill the context with tool descriptions. See db-tool-registry branch.

2. Leveraging declarative tools definitions (YAML files) and server customization. So that tools can be easily modified in the field we want tools defined using the declarative approach where we define the tool in yaml. We have a number of tools that have been developed to configure an environment, we would like to explore an alternative approach to configurations.

• Determine an approach within to address configuration requirements that works with the declarative framework
• Move as many tools as possible from Python code to YAML for better maintainability.
• Identify tool modules that can be moved to Skills/prompts and custom tool definitions (provided under the server configuration examples as opposed to packaged within the source code), the target is every module except the explicit tool set.
  • BAR move to skills and custom tool, need to think about the non-standard configuration steps
  • Base - some to become explicit, rest will go to custom tool
  • Chat module - move to custom tool, need to think about the non-standard configuration steps
  • DBA - move all to custom tool
  • FS - move to skills/prompts and custom tool
  • Plot - move to skills/prompts and custom tool
  • Qlty - move to custom tool
  • Rag - move to skills/prompts and custom tool
  • Sec - move to custom tool
  • Sql_opt - move to skill/prompts and custom tool
  • TDVS - are these required given the skills from the cookbooks
  • TDML Tools - are these required given the skills from the cookbooks

3. Technical changes

• Moving FastMCP 3. This will enable some new capabilities to be picked up with the updated framework.
• Dynamic tool management: does not require a server reboot to add new tools.

4. Process changes

• Claude to help code, Will need to help set this up with Claude.md and associated skills
• Github actions to automate testing
• Add dependency risk scanner
• Automate push to pypi

These changes would take some time to make, but before we make any changes we wanted to hear from you. What concerns do you have? What changes do you think we have missed? We are asking for feedback by the end of March to help facilitate our direction.
Regards,