RAG patterns that work for structured data vs ones that fail

Most RAG failures in enterprise systems do not come from the embedding model. They come from using the same retrieval pattern for every kind of data. A policy document, a support article, and a 12-year-old ERP schema are not the same problem. Treating them the same is how teams end up with demos that look useful and production systems that quietly return wrong answers. At BrainPack, we see this most often when teams try to use naive RAG over structured enterprise data. The pattern usually looks