Agentic AI with DuckDB and smolagents: Natural Language Queries for Analytics
Agentic AI with DuckDB turns natural language queries for analytics from a nice idea into something you can actually run today. Many users don’t want to think in joins, window functions, or aggregate clauses — they just want answers. Here I’ll walk through how I use...
Data and Analytics Skills 2026+: Why You Need More Than a Full Toolbox
The demands on data professionals and leaders are changing rapidly. Technologies, methods and tools come and go – and with LLMs like ChatGPT, generic knowledge is increasingly automatable. This makes one question even more important: how do I position myself so that...
SQL in Jupyter Notebook (or Google Colab) – with DuckDB & JupySQL
If you live in Python notebooks all day, it’s only a matter of time until you want proper SQL right next to your code. No extra UI, no switching tools, just plain SQL with output. This article covers: Why running SQL inside a notebook is useful How to enable it in...
The illusion of simplicity: hidden reporting pitfalls of the Big-Table model
At first glance, a single denormalized big-table seems like a reporting hero: no joins, just one table to maintain, and demo queries that fly. But the honeymoon rarely lasts. When real-world business demands hit, the simplicity turns out to be an illusion—and the...
If It’s Easy, Is It Worthless? The Data Complexity Trap
If It’s Easy, Is It Worthless? Google Search, the iPhone, and countless other products prove the opposite: the simplest experience often delivers the highest value. So why do our data products still drift toward baroque complexity?Why complexity creeps in – three...
TDWI Munich 2025 Unleashed – My Key Take-Aways on Generative AI, Complexity Reduction & Data Governance
The TDWI Munich 2025 once again proved why it is an excellent event for data, analytics and AI professionals. Below you’ll find my personal notes and reflections from three packed days in the “Data Universe”.Generative AI: The Urgency and Opportunity Stephen Brobst...
From Raw Text to Ready Answers — A Technical Deep-Dive into Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Large language models (LLMs) are astonishing pattern-completion engines, but they are also static archives: everything they “know” is baked into billions of parameters frozen at training time. Once the world changes—or your sensitive company manuals that are not...
Integrating Oracle AI Vector, Ollama, and Mistral
The convergence of relational databases and generative AI is reshaping data architecture. By integrating Oracle AI Vector Search, Ollama, and Mistral, developers can build intelligent applications that leverage structured data, semantic search, and local LLMs—all...
Spotify music clustering with Oracle AI Vector: From vectors to visual insights
The article uses Oracle AI Vector for a use case to cluster and visualize vectors. In my previous article I showed how to enable Oracle AI Vector, create a table with a vector and query it with simple SQL. Today we’ll run a more colorful experiment: storing Spotify...
Boost your AI workflow with Ollama, Mistral, and PostgreSQL
Are you looking to boost your AI workflow with powerful language models locally and combine their capabilities with the robustness of a relational database? In this post, I'll explore how to use Ollama with Mistral—a recently introduced open-source large language...
Databases in 2024: The Year of Disruption, License Wars, and Billion-Dollar Moves
In his article, "Databases in 2024: A Year in Review," Andy Pavlo provides a comprehensive analysis of the state of databases in the past year, offering a reflection on the triumphs, struggles, and significant trends that have shaped the industry. The database market,...
2025 Predictions: Vector Technologies and AI Trends to Watch
As 2024 comes to a close, the world of AI and vector technologies stands on the brink of transformational change. What emerging trends will shape the landscape in 2025? From agentic AI systems to the growing importance of unstructured data, the next year promises...