Semantic retrieval is a way of finding information based on meaning rather than matching exact words. You ask a question or describe what you need, and the system finds relevant results even if they use completely different wording. That gap between what someone types and what they actually mean is exactly what semantic retrieval is designed to close.
Fix “The datepart … is not supported by date function dateadd for data type date” in SQL Server
If you’re getting error 9810 that reads something like “The datepart hour is not supported by date function dateadd for data type date“, it’s because the datepart that you’re trying to add or subtract a datepart is not supported for the data type of the original value.
This typically happens when you try to add a timepart to a date value. For example, trying to add an hour to a date value will result in this error, because the date type doesn’t support the hour datepart. You can’t have a date value that includes the hour.
What Is an Embedding?
One of the hardest things about building AI systems is that the things humans care about (words, sentences, images, ideas, etc) aren’t naturally something a computer can do math on. A computer doesn’t inherently know that “happy” and “joyful” are similar, or that a photo of a dog and the word “dog” are related. It just sees raw data.
Embeddings are the solution to that problem.
Data Quality Management Explained
Bad data is more common than most organizations want to admit. And more costly. Decisions get made on outdated numbers, reports contradict each other, and engineers spend hours tracking down why a dashboard looks wrong. Data quality management is how you prevent all of that from becoming the norm.
How to Format Dates in SQL Server (A Beginner’s Guide)
Dates in SQL Server can be surprisingly tricky if you’re new to the game. The way dates are stored is not always the way you want them displayed, and figuring out how to convert one to the other is one of those things every beginner eventually Googles. So let’s walk through it clearly.
What is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
Large language models are impressive, but they have a fundamental limitation in that they only know what they were trained on. Ask a model about something that happened after its training cutoff, or about a document sitting in your company’s internal knowledge base, and it either makes something up or tells you it doesn’t know.
Retrieval-augmented generation, almost always shortened to RAG, is the approach the industry has settled on to fix this.
The idea is pretty straightforward. Instead of relying purely on what the model has memorized, you give it the ability to pull in relevant information from an external source, then use that information to generate a response.
What is an Embedding Model?
Computers are good at numbers. They’re not naturally good at understanding that “dog” and “puppy” are related, that a photo of a beach and the phrase “summer vacation” share something in common, or that a five-star review and the sentence “this product is amazing” mean roughly the same thing.
Embedding models are how we bridge that gap.
JSON_ARRAYAGG() in SQL Server 2025: Aggregate Rows Into JSON Arrays
JSON_ARRAYAGG() is one of the new features introduced in SQL Server 2025. This is an aggregation function that allows you to combine multiple row values into a single JSON array directly within your SQL queries.
JSON_ARRAYAGG() simplifies the process of generating structured JSON output from relational data, which makes it easier to build APIs, export data, and integrate with modern applications that rely on JSON. Instead of manually constructing JSON with string operations or complex subqueries, JSON_ARRAYAGG() provides a clean, efficient way to transform sets of rows into well-formed JSON arrays as part of standard SQL aggregation.
What is a Data Mesh?
Data mesh is one of the newer ideas in the data world. And it’s generated a lot of confusion. Unlike data lakes or data warehouses, it’s not a technology you buy or install. Rather, it’s a way of organizing how your company thinks about and manages data.
What Is an Edge Database?
If you’ve been hearing “edge database” thrown around and aren’t totally sure what it means, you’re not alone. The term often gets used loosely, so let’s break it down clearly.