Persistent multi-agent conversations with the OpenAI Agents SDK and MongoDB

Version 0.14.2 added a MongoDBSession backend; here’s a working multi-agent customer-support demo that uses it, and the documents it leaves behind.

The OpenAI Agents SDK has shipped session backends for SQLite, SQLAlchemy, Redis, and Dapr for a while now. With 0.14.2 (April 2026), MongoDBSession joined that list, and 0.14.6 added the docs page. If you’re already running MongoDB for application data, this is the moment to stop standing up a second store just to remember what the agent said three turns ago. The demo for this walkthrough is a small e-commerce support app with three handoff-connected agents and one MongoDB instance behind everything: customers, orders, support articles, and the conversation history.

Repo: https://github.com/alexbevi/mongodb-openai-agents-sdk-example.

What you’ll build

A CLI customer-support agent that identifies the user from MongoDB, hands off between a triage agent, an order-support agent, and a knowledge-base agent, and persists every turn (user message, tool call, tool output, assistant reply, handoff) to MongoDB via MongoDBSession. You quit, restart the process, log in with the same email, and the agent picks up the thread — no re-explaining the return you started yesterday.

Why MongoDB for sessions

A session backend has three jobs: store one item per turn, return them in order on the next run, and not corrupt itself when two processes write at once. The interesting part for MongoDB is how naturally each of those maps to things the database already does.

Items in a session are heterogeneous. A turn can be a user message, a tool call, a tool result, an assistant message, or a handoff record — each with its own shape. A document store takes those payloads as-is. There’s no messages table you have to migrate every time the SDK adds a new run-item type, and no JSON column to parse around.

Ordering is the hard part, and $inc is built for it. MongoDBSession stamps each message with a monotonically increasing seq counter — the SDK docs call this out explicitly: it preserves ordering across concurrent writers and processes. That’s a single-document atomic increment, not a distributed lock or an optimistic-retry loop. Two FastAPI workers handling the same session_id won’t interleave.

One store, one connection pool. This is the angle the demo actually showcases. The ecommerce_support database holds customers, orders, and support_articles next to agent_sessions and agent_messages. Tools query operational data, the SDK persists turns, and they share the same AsyncMongoClient. Adding session memory cost zero new infrastructure.

Walkthrough

1. Prerequisites

Python 3.10+, an OpenAI API key, and either a local mongod or a MongoDB Atlas cluster. Nothing in the demo requires Atlas-only features — a 27017 on localhost is fine.

2. Install

requirements.txt pins the new extra:

openai-agents[mongodb]>=0.14.2
python-dotenv>=1.0.0
pymongo>=4.13

pip install -r requirements.txt

The [mongodb] extra pulls in pymongo’s async client; the MongoDBSession class lives at agents.extensions.memory.MongoDBSession.

3. Connect

The demo uses one shared AsyncMongoClient per process (the right pattern — sessions don’t own the client, they share its pool):

from pymongo.asynchronous.mongo_client import AsyncMongoClient

MONGODB_URI = os.environ.get("MONGODB_URI", "mongodb://localhost:27017")
DB_NAME = "ecommerce_support"

mongo_client = AsyncMongoClient(MONGODB_URI)
db = mongo_client[DB_NAME]

try:
    await mongo_client.admin.command("ping")
except Exception as exc:
    print(f"\nCannot connect to MongoDB ({MONGODB_URI}):\n  {exc}")
    return

4. Seed and identify

python seed_data.py loads three demo customers, five products, five orders with embedded line items, and seven support articles indexed for $text search. Then main.py looks the customer up so the triage agent doesn’t have to ask for an email it already knows.

5. Instantiate the session

This is the integration:

session_id = f"support_{email.replace('@', '_at_').replace('.', '_')}"
session = MongoDBSession(
    session_id=session_id,
    client=mongo_client,
    database=DB_NAME,
)

if not await session.ping():
    print("Warning: MongoDB session storage is unavailable.")

existing = await session.get_items()

Constructing with client= (rather than MongoDBSession.from_uri(...)) means the session shares the app’s connection pool and session.close() becomes a no-op — the lifecycle stays with you. session.ping() is a real round-trip against MongoDB, useful for liveness probes.

6. Run

Pass session= to the runner. Everything else is the same SDK you already know:

with trace("Customer Support", group_id=conversation_id):
    result = await Runner.run(
        current_agent,
        input=user_input,
        context=ctx,
        session=session,   # MongoDB stores every turn automatically
    )

Have a conversation, quit, run python main.py again with the same email, and the next message gets the full prior context prepended automatically.

What MongoDB actually stored

After a few turns with alice@example.com, two collections show up in the ecommerce_support database. The interesting one is agent_messages. A representative document, abridged:

{
  _id: ObjectId("6620d1f4..."),
  session_id: "support_alice_at_example_com",   // partition key for this conversation
  seq: 7,                                        // monotonically increasing turn order
  message_data: {                                // the SDK's run-item, stored as-is
    type: "function_call_output",
    call_id: "call_8b2...",
    output: "Return initiated for order ORD-1001.\nReason: Not powerful enough...\nEstimated refund: $1,484.98 (includes 10% Gold loyalty bonus)"
  },
  created_at: ISODate("2026-04-26T19:14:08.221Z")
}

Three fields earn their keep:

• session_id is the only field every read filters on. It’s the partition key for “this conversation.”
• seq is the integer that makes ordering deterministic. The SDK reads with sort({ seq: 1 }) and writes with an atomic $inc against the matching agent_sessions document, which is what makes concurrent workers safe without a distributed lock.
• message_data is the SDK’s run-item — a user message, tool call, tool output, assistant message, or handoff. Different shape every time. The document model just stores it.

agent_sessions holds one document per session_id with the current high-water seq and timestamps — that’s the counter $inc operates on.

The SDK creates its indexes on first use (per the sessions docs). You’ll see a compound index on (session_id, seq) on agent_messages (the only access pattern the SDK has — fetch ordered history for one session) and a unique index on session_id in agent_sessions.

Production notes

For Atlas, swap the URI for mongodb+srv://... — MongoDBSession accepts it without any other change. If abandoned conversations accumulate, add a TTL index on agent_messages.created_at and old turns retire on their own.

Connection lifetime matters: keep one AsyncMongoClient per process, construct MongoDBSession(client=...) per request, and let the Runner do the rest. Don’t reach for MongoDBSession.from_uri(...) in a web handler — it builds and tears down a client every call. The session needs read/write on the two configured collections (defaults agent_sessions and agent_messages, both overridable via sessions_collection= and messages_collection=). The seq counter keeps concurrent writers safe, but fanning the same session_id across processes will interleave their turns — safe, but probably not what the user meant.

Try it yourself

git clone https://github.com/alexbevi/mongodb-openai-agents-sdk-example
cd mongodb-openai-agents-sdk-example
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp env.example .env          # set OPENAI_API_KEY and MONGODB_URI
python seed_data.py
python main.py

Required env vars: OPENAI_API_KEY, MONGODB_URI (defaults to mongodb://localhost:27017). Demo accounts: alice@example.com (Gold), bob@example.com (Standard), carol@example.com (Platinum).

Where to go next

• The full session API surface — get_items, add_items, pop_item, clear_session, ping — is documented in the Sessions overview, including the MongoDB-specific notes on collection naming and Atlas URIs.
• Wrap your MongoDBSession in OpenAIResponsesCompactionSession once threads grow long; it summarizes old turns server-side and rewrites the underlying session.
• The natural next MongoDB feature for this demo is Atlas Vector Search — store embeddings on support_articles and replace the $text query in search_knowledge_base with $vectorSearch. Same database, same client, one new index.