MCKNIGHT CONSULTING GROUP BLOG

William McKnight and Jake Dolezal Picture stock trading activity at a brokerage on a busy morning. Every trade the firm handles is landing in one big table, continuously, all day with:  None of the queries are complex. Most of them are basic – count the flagged trades, total the volume per account, rank the busiest…

Informatica, a Salesforce company, provides the governed metadata foundation critical to stopping “token bleed”—the soaring costs, latency, and context bloat caused by feeding raw, uncurated enterprise data into LLMs. Jake Dolezal and William McKnight McKnight Consulting GroupAugust 2026 In brief Our methodology compares token consumption and accuracy for identical AI requests across 15 million objects…

In the enterprise world, there is often a massive disconnect between the technical realities of data engineering and the bottom-line expectations of the C-suite. Bridging that gap isn’t just about understanding the technology; it’s about translating complex infrastructure into real-world business value. Over years of analyzing benchmark reports and steering enterprise projects, I’ve found that…

Data architecture is ultimately about driving real business outcomes, not just implementing new technology. In over 17 years of consulting at McKnight Consulting Group, we have helped hundreds of enterprises navigate their most complex data challenges. The biggest successes always come when we align technical data strategies with clear business goals. Here are three real-world challenges…

I was recently asked about where the biggest wins in the enterprise with data came from. I touched on these 3 items below, but now I’ve had a chance to fill in some details that I present today. Here are three practical lessons and insights from our real-world enterprise projects: 1. Tie Data Quality Directly…

Abstract: The return on investment (ROI) for AI projects is usually present and often essential for project justification, especially given the need for meaningful AI projects. This article provides a framework for quantifying AI’s financial benefits by breaking down costs and returns to cash flow over a defined period, illustrating with hypothetical examples. My background…

SAP and Databricks are announcing a new strategic partnership to address long-standing challenges SAP customers face in accessing and utilizing their SAP data, particularly for AI and modern data warehousing. The partnership introduces “SAP Databricks” as part of SAP’s Business Data Cloud (BDC) offering. The key innovation is a zero-copy data access capability that allows…

Oracle’s introduction of GPU capabilities to their Compute Cloud Customer (C3) and Private Cloud Appliance (PCA) products represents a strategic move in the evolving hybrid cloud and AI infrastructure market. The infrastructure is built around NVIDIA L40S GPUs, offering multi-workload capabilities for AI, graphics, and HPC, and can scale from 4 to 48 GPUs with…

ThoughtSpot’s latest innovation, Analyst Studio, is for data teams. This collaborative creator space empowers analysts to prepare data for AI and analytics, manage cloud costs, and seamlessly switch between ad-hoc analysis and advanced data science. With Analyst Studio, data teams can work faster, smarter, and more collaboratively than ever before. Analyst Studio tackles key challenges…

Announced today, the Oracle Exadata X11M is the 13th generation of Exadata, designed to deliver performance, scalability, and availability for data and AI workloads at a lower cost. The X11M boasts a unique architecture with data-optimized hardware, intelligent software, and the flexibility to run on-premises, in the cloud, or in multi-cloud environments. Featuring the latest…