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WritingsApr 17, 2026Source article

Many Startups

wish death upon me
Instead of forcing every kind of unstructured data into the same SQL tables, start with the intended use and create useful copies for each use case.
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Truly, the number of “unstructured data” startups is crazy.

The number one reason being... unstructured data is hard.

The main reason being that ya’ll are doing the same thing.

Pipeline data ingestion.

Put all that unstructured data into SQL.

Then do SQL queries on top of it.

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Maybe the reason its unstructured is a good thing.

Maybe the fact that it is freeform means it has more information in it.

And you formatting it into the same SQL tables isn’t all that useful.

You’re dealing with an infinite number of possible data files, with infinite combinations. In my opinion, its better to think backwards, thereby inverting the problem.

What are you trying to do with your data? Since storage is now relatively cheap, we can make “useful copies”, for each usecase.

I’ve seen this work better.

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