A database object, made with CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL, that stores the details AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS needs to call an AI model: endpoint, API format, model type (EMBEDDINGS), model name and credential. It is changed with ALTER, and dropping it leaves the credential in place.
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In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains External model in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Schema
The middle part of a Unity Catalog name (
catalog.schema.table), grouping tables, views, volumes, functions and models inside a catalog. A grant on it covers everything in it now and later, and nothing inside can be reached withoutUSE SCHEMA. - CRUD
Shorthand for create, read, update and delete, the four basic things you do with data. Data-plane roles in Azure Cosmos DB, for instance, authorise those operations on items.
- Field generation method
How a Content Understanding schema field is filled: extract takes the value as written (documents only), classify chooses from categories, and generate infers or summarises it.
- Embeddings
Vectors of numbers encoding what text means, placing related content close together as judged by cosine similarity. Switching model or vector size requires embedding all content again.
- API
Short for application programming interface: a contract that client code calls programmatically, for example a web API secured with tokens or the Files, Images or Responses APIs.
- FORMAT
A DAX function that turns a value into text according to a format string, for instance "MMMM" to show a month's name. Since the output is text, numeric operations can't use it, and dynamic format strings were introduced to get around that.
- Embeddings model
A model whose output is vectors rather than text, used to power semantic search, recommendations and similarity matching.
Related terms
- Ollama
Software for hosting AI models on your own machine. CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL accepts it as an API format, pointing at an endpoint like https://localhost:{port}/api/embed.
- ONNX Runtime
An open-source engine for running ONNX models on the machine itself. When installed on Windows, SQL Server 2025 points an external model at it with LOCAL_RUNTIME_PATH, so embeddings are created with nothing remote involved.