AI Book Archives - SQL Authority with Pinal Dave

Figure from chapter six showing that AI writes the draft while review and tests decide whether it ships.

AI-Written SQL: The Query That Ran and Lied

November 5, 2026

AI, AI Book, Software Development, SQL Performance

Part six of ten. AI-written SQL fails in a way that plain bad code never does. It runs, it returns a number, and the number is wrong. Here is one that came out 28 times too big. The number While writing chapter 6 of my new book, I asked an…

AI Interview Questions Test You, Not the Machine

October 24, 2026

Pinal Dave

AI, AI Book, Career Advice, SQL Humor

AI interview questions test whether you can explain something out loud. Cardinal can produce an answer. Cardinal cannot be asked.

Figure showing an embedding map where related ideas become neighbours.

Embeddings and Vectors: The Map of Meaning

October 22, 2026

Pinal Dave

AI, AI Book, Database, SQL Data Storage

Part four of ten. Search used to mean matching words. Embeddings let a system match meaning instead, and almost every AI feature that touches your data stands on that one idea. 1. What is an embedding? An embedding is a list of numbers that stands for the meaning of a…

Figure from chapter three, a two by two grid with sounds sure and sounds unsure across the top and right and wrong down the side, with the sure and wrong square marked as the danger zone.

Why AI Sounds Confident When It’s Wrong

October 15, 2026

Pinal Dave

AI, AI Book, Best Practices, Career Advice

Part three of ten. A wrong answer from a model sounds exactly like a right one. That single fact explains most of the damage AI does at work. Here are five interview answers that prove you already know it. Look at that grid for a second. Three of those four…

AI Sounds Like Someone, But Nobody Is in There

October 10, 2026

Pinal Dave

AI, AI Book, Best Practices, SQL Humor

AI sounds like someone, which is exactly why the checking stops. Cardinal read the cover of my book and has not recovered.

Figure showing that the model sees only what fits in its context window, and everything else is gone.

Tokens and the Context Window: Out of the Window, Out of Mind

October 8, 2026

Pinal Dave

AI, AI Book, Best Practices, Professional Development

Part two of ten. Most of the surprises people hit with AI at work trace back to this one chapter. A model reads in tokens, holds only so many at once, and charges for each one. 1. What is a token? A token is the unit of text a model…

Figure showing four circles, one inside the next: AI, machine learning, deep learning and generative AI.

AI Basics: The Four Circles, and Four More Questions

October 1, 2026

Pinal Dave

AI, AI Book, Career Advice, Professional Development

Part one of ten. Most AI interview questions start here, even for senior roles. Someone asks you to explain a large language model in plain words, and your answer tells them more than your resume does. 1. What is the difference between AI, machine learning, deep learning and generative AI?…