When RAG Actually Helps and When It Hides Bad Retrieval
Retrieval-augmented generation looks like an answer to every grounding problem. The honest test for whether you need RAG, fine-tuning or a cleaner data source.
Read the piece ↗ Data that holds
under the bill
Schema design, ingestion, vector stores, retrieval observability and the contract between the data team and the people consuming it. For data engineers and platform leads who own the pipeline and the bill.
Data Platform
When RAG Actually Helps and When It Hides Bad Retrieval
Retrieval-augmented generation looks like an answer to every grounding problem. The honest test for whether you need RAG, fine-tuning or a cleaner data source.
Data Platform
Vector Store Sizing: The Cost Truth Nobody Tells You
What a million vectors actually costs across Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate and pgvector, and the configuration choices that move the bill by 5x.
Data Platform
Warehouse Cost Control: The Quarterly Ritual
Snowflake, BigQuery and Redshift bills grow quietly until the CFO asks why. The quarterly ritual that catches offenders before emergency cost-cuts.
Data Platform
Streaming Data Pipelines: The Back-Pressure Trap
Streaming pipelines work until the consumer falls behind the producer. Patterns that handle back-pressure without dropping data or stalling the source.