What Is Synthetic Data?

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Data is the fuel that powers machine learning. The more of it you have, the better your models tend to perform. But real-world data comes with a lot of baggage. Privacy concerns, legal restrictions, high collection costs, and sometimes, just plain scarcity. Synthetic data is how the industry is working around that problem.

Simply put, synthetic data is artificially generated data that mimics real data without actually being real.

It’s not collected from users, scraped from the web, or pulled from production systems. It’s created by algorithms, statistical models, or AI systems that have learned the patterns and structure of real data well enough to produce convincing imitations of it.

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What is an AI-Native Database?

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As AI has become central to how software is built, the database industry has responded in two ways. Some databases have added AI features on top of their existing architecture. Vector search here, a natural language query interface there. Others have been built from scratch with AI workloads as the primary design constraint.

That second category is what we mean by “AI-native”.

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Ontology-Based Data Storage Explained

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Ontology-based data storage is a way of organizing data using a formal model that defines what things are and how they relate to each other. The model itself, the ontology, sits at the center of how everything is stored and queried. Rather than treating data as rows and values, it treats data as a web of typed, rule-governed relationships that the system can reason with directly.

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What is a Self-Driving Database?

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Databases are everywhere. Every app you use, every website you visit, every transaction you make is backed by a database. But keeping a database running well has always required a lot of human expertise. Expertise for things like tuning performance, managing storage, applying patches, backing up data, scaling up when traffic spikes. For decades, this was just the cost of doing business. You hired database administrators, and they kept the lights on.

A self-driving database is one that handles most of that work itself.

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Fix Error 155 “‘DAYS’ is not a recognized dateadd option” in SQL Server

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If you’re getting an error that reads something like “‘DAYS’ is not a recognized dateadd option” in SQL Server, it’s because you’re using the DATEADD() function with an invalid datepart argument.

This often happens when you use a plural form of the argument. For example, DAYS instead of DAY. Or HOURS instead of HOUR.

The easiest way to fix this is to provide a valid datepart argument.

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What is Data Stewardship?

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You might have seen “data steward” in a job description or heard it mentioned alongside data governance and wondered what it actually means in practice. It’s one of those roles that’s easy to overlook but plays a surprisingly important part in keeping an organization’s data trustworthy and usable.

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