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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Semantic Retrieval Explained

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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.

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Fix “The datepart … is not supported by date function dateadd for data type date” in SQL Server

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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.

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What Is an Embedding?

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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.

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Data Quality Management Explained

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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.

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