Semantic Chunking vs Fixed Chunking: Why Your RAG’s Retrieval Quality Starts Before the Query

This is Part 2 of a 5-part series on building a production-grade RAG system. Part 1 - Hybrid RAG Overview Part 2 - Semantic Chunking vs Fixed Chunking (you are here) Part 3 - Custom Reranking: Combining Dense and Sparse Scores Part 4 - Parent-Child Document Architecture Part 5 - Building a Tool-Augmented RAG Agent Most RAG failures are not retrieval failures - they’re chunking failures. The vector database returns exactly what you put in.