Blog
Insights on data architecture, cloud solutions, and platform engineering.
-
AI Agent Memory: The Infrastructure Layer Nobody Told You About
June 8, 2026The context window is not memory — it's a scratchpad. For agents that need to persist knowledge across sessions, the architecture choices matter enormously. A deep dive into the four memory types, how AWS Bedrock AgentCore, GCP Vertex Memory Bank, OpenAI, and Claude implement them, the security risks of memory poisoning, and what actually goes wrong in production.
-
VertiPaq Internals: What's Really Happening When Power BI Loads Your Model
March 15, 2026Every refresh, 200 MB of raw data becomes a 40 MB in-memory structure that answers complex aggregations in milliseconds. The engine behind this is VertiPaq — and understanding its columnar encoding, SE/FE split, relationship hashmaps, and segment architecture turns model optimization from cargo-cult advice into engineering decisions.
-
Microsoft Fabric vs Databricks on Azure: The 2025 Decision Guide
December 10, 2025Fabric is SaaS, Databricks is PaaS, and the pricing models are completely different animals. By late 2025, Unity Catalog OneLake mirroring makes the hybrid path genuinely viable. A practitioner's comparison covering TCO with real numbers, governance models, ML toolchain gaps, Photon vs Fabric Spark, and a decision framework that actually leads to a recommendation.
-
Direct Lake vs Import vs DirectQuery: How to Stop Guessing and Actually Choose
October 7, 2025Import and Direct Lake both use VertiPaq. DirectQuery usually doesn't. That one fact changes everything about how you reason over performance, freshness, and modeling trade-offs. A practical guide to choosing the right Power BI storage mode — including composite models, the five mistakes that ruin production deployments, and a decision tree that actually leads to an answer.
-
RAG on GCP: From First Corpus to Production — A Practitioner's Guide
July 15, 2025GCP has three distinct RAG paths — Vertex AI Search, the managed RAG Engine, and DIY with AlloyDB or Vector Search — and the right choice depends on how custom your retrieval needs to be. Covers chunking strategies, embedding model versioning, the context window cost cliff, production failure modes, TCO comparison, and when to use Gemini Flash vs Pro.
-
Open Table Formats: Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Hudi — The War Nobody Told Your Data Team About
June 8, 2025Three teams at Netflix, Databricks, and Uber independently solved the same problem: how do you get ACID transactions, schema evolution, and row-level deletes on top of object storage? Their solutions — Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Hudi — are now converging in ways nobody predicted. An internals-first guide to how they actually work and how to choose between them.
-
Microsoft Fabric in the Azure Ecosystem: Migration, Integration, and the Databricks Question
February 12, 2025Fabric collapses Azure Synapse, ADF, Power BI Premium, and ADX into one platform — but the migration isn't a checkbox exercise. A technical guide covering the ADF and Synapse migration paths, where the TCO math actually works, the honest Databricks vs Fabric comparison, and the hybrid pattern that most large organizations end up running in practice.
-
Power BI & Semantic Models Deep Dive
June 8, 2024Explore the architecture and optimization of Power BI semantic models—from query folding and Import/DirectQuery modes to DAX performance tuning and star schema design. Master the semantic layer that powers effective BI systems.
-
Understanding MS Fabric Internals
June 9, 2023A deep dive into Microsoft Fabric's architecture—from OneLake storage and Spark compute to semantic models and governance. Learn how Fabric unifies data engineering, warehousing, and analytics under a single SaaS platform.