Structured and unstructured data
Level 1
Structured data lives in neat rows and columns; unstructured data does not.
Term 2 of 7 in Data and databases
In plain language
A spreadsheet of orders is structured. Emails, PDFs, recordings and photos are unstructured. Historically software only handled the tidy kind, which is exactly what modern AI changed.
Think of it like this
A filing cabinet versus a shoebox of receipts.
Why it matters
The reason AI feels transformative in real businesses is that most of their information was sitting in the shoebox.
Next terms in Data and databases
- DatasetA collection of examples gathered for a model to learn from or be tested on.
- EmbeddingA list of numbers that captures the meaning of a piece of text or an image.
- Vector databaseA database built to store embeddings and find the closest matches fast.
- Retrieval augmented generationFetching relevant documents first, then asking the model to answer using them.