Database Concepts

What is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?

March 28, 2026March 25, 2026 by Ian

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?

March 28, 2026March 24, 2026 by Ian

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.

What is a Data Mesh?

March 22, 2026 by Ian

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?

March 21, 2026 by Ian

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.

Data Governance Explained

March 20, 2026 by Ian

Data governance isn’t the most exciting term in the data world, but it might be one of the most important. Companies that ignore it tend to find out why it matters the hard way. Often this is through a compliance failure, a data breach, or a boardroom argument about whose numbers are right.

What is a Data Mart?

March 18, 2026 by Ian

You might have heard “data mart” come up in conversations about analytics or business intelligence and wondered how it’s different from a database or a data warehouse. It’s a fair question, because the terms get muddled a lot. Here’s a clear breakdown.

Column-Level Security Explained

March 17, 2026 by Ian

You may be aware of a concept called row-level security, which controls which rows a user can see in a table. Column-level security is a similar concept, controls which columns are visible. It solves a different problem. Same table, same rows, but some fields in those rows shouldn’t be visible to everyone.

Think about an employees table. A manager might reasonably see a list of all staff and their departments. But salary? National ID numbers? Personal contact details? These should be visible to the manager, but they probably shouldn’t be visible to most other employees, even if they’re querying the same table.

Understanding Row-Level Security (RLS)

March 16, 2026 by Ian

Most developers learn about database permissions in broad strokes. You grant a user access to a table, and they can read it. Simple. But what happens when different users should only see some of the rows in that table? That’s where row-level security comes in.

Data Lineage Explained

March 14, 2026 by Ian

Data lineage is one of those concepts that sounds more complicated than it is. Once you understand the basic idea, it’s actually pretty intuitive. And it solves a problem that anyone who works with data has run into.

What is a Data Lake?

March 13, 2026 by Ian

Data lake is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in conversations about data strategy, often alongside data warehouses and data marts. But what actually is a data lake, and how does it fit into the picture? Let’s find out.