Every RAG tutorial starts the same way.

Title: Every RAG tutorial starts the same way.

URL Source: https://sahajshukla.medium.com/every-rag-tutorial-starts-the-same-way-0579f0bf74ef?source=rss------rag-5

Published Time: 2026-04-21T19:49:12Z

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# Every RAG tutorial starts the same way. | by Sahaj Shukla | Apr, 2026 | Medium

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# Every RAG tutorial starts the same way.

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Load a PDF. Chunk it into 1,000-character slices. Embed with OpenAI. Drop into Chroma. Pass the top-5 chunks to GPT-4. Ship it.

That’s not RAG. That’s a demo.

Actual enterprise data doesn’t live in PDFs. It lives in:

* A Snowflake warehouse with 2,300 tables
* A Databricks lakehouse ingesting 40 GB of CDC events per hour
* A dozen Kafka topics that the finance team swears by
* An operational Postgres that’s mutated 400 times since you started reading this
* And yes, somewhere in SharePoint, a folder of PDFs that nobody owns

If you build a RAG system for this world the way the tutorials tell you to, it will fail in production within a week. Not because the model isn’t smart. Because you’re chunking and embedding the wrong things.

I’ve spent the last year building retrieval systems for regulated financial data — schema-aware NL2SQL for