The Hidden Cost of ai_parse_document in Production (10 minute read) (opens in new tab)

Databricks' ai_parse_document + ai_query can turn messy PDFs into structured JSON in a few SQL lines, but the challenge is reliability at scale. Every rerun reopens parsing and LLM costs, corrected documents can create duplicates, and even temperature 0 still produces non-deterministic outputs that undermine auditability. A pipeline design with checkpoints, versioned prompts, and deduplication reduces reprocessing cost and improves reproducibility. Deterministic parsers like OpenDataLoader PD...