Data & AI Engineering

When to hire a Databricks medallion architecture consultant, what a 14-day build should deliver, and what bronze to gold really costs.

The real cost to build a RAG chatbot, split into build and run, with worked numbers for internal, customer-facing and regulated use.

When to use a Databricks repair run or full rerun, how to fix corrupted checkpoints, Auto Loader schema changes and 900-second timeouts.

Build an idempotent data pipeline on Databricks: Delta MERGE on a clean key, hash-diff CDC with no watermark, and append-only archives.

Plan a SQL Server to Databricks migration: rebuild SSIS in Lakeflow, move CDC to Lakeflow Connect, map T-SQL types and prove KPI parity.

AI agents hallucinate on company data because of context, not the model. A symptom to cause to fix table for the four real culprits.

A data readiness checklist for AI agents covering lineage, freshness, access control, PII, schema stability and evaluation data.

A budget holder’s guide to Splunk pricing: what the reported per GB/day rates mean, what a $2M contract covers, and how to run the lakehouse comparison with your own numbers.

Context engineering for AI agents goes past prompts: retrieval design, chunking, memory, tool context and how each one fails.