Data fabric is a term that gets used a lot in enterprise tech circles, but it’s often explained in ways that are either too vague or too technical to be useful. Here’s a plain-language breakdown of what it actually means.
Understanding High-Dimensional Vector Search
High-dimensional vector search is a foundational way AI systems find similar or relevant items across large datasets when the data has been converted into vectors. If you’ve used semantic search, gotten eerily accurate recommendations, or worked with a retrieval-augmented AI tool, this is often the mechanism running underneath.
How to Get the Current Date in SQL Server
SQL Server has several functions that return the current date and time. If you just need today’s date for a query, that sounds like it should be simple. And it is. But there are six different functions to choose from, and they don’t all return the same thing. This article explains what each one does and when to use it.
What is Data Stewardship?
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.
Semantic Retrieval Explained
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.