Vector Databases
Approximate nearest-neighbour search, filtering and re-indexing.
4 to work through
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intermediate
A team needs vector search. When is a dedicated vector database justified over adding vector search to an existing store?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A team wants a dedicated vector database for a RAG system over 200,000 documents. Is it necessary?
2 min answer -
advanced Multiple choice
A multi-tenant assistant searches one HNSW index of 200M vectors and filters results to the requesting tenant. Large tenants are fine. For tenants with only a few thousand documents recall collapses and latency triples. Which change fixes it?
3 min answer -
advanced Multiple choice
A platform needs similarity search over a large and growing corpus. What decides between a dedicated vector database, a vector extension to an existing store, and a search engine with vector support?
2 min answer
2 terms in this topic
Approximate Nearest Neighbour Index
An index that trades exactness for speed when finding similar vectors, making large-scale semantic search feasible.
patternFiltered Vector Search
Combining a metadata predicate with approximate nearest-neighbour search - where the predicate's selectivity, not the corpus size, decides whether re…
Neighbouring topics
AI-Era Architecture
General material on architecting systems that include models.
LLM Application Architecture
The shape of a production system with a model in the request path.
RAG Architecture
Retrieval, grounding, citation and the permissions RAG can enforce.
Embeddings
Dense representations, model coupling and the migration they imply.
Chunking & Retrieval
Structure-aware splitting, hybrid search and why chunking dominates quality.
Reranking
Cross-encoders improving precision more than a bigger embedding model.
Model Selection
Capability, latency, cost and the evaluation that decides between them.
AI Gateways
Centralised routing, keys, quotas, caching, logging and safety policy.
Prompt & Version Management
Prompts as reviewed, versioned, evaluated production configuration.
Agent Architectures
Loops, planning, memory and the boundaries an agent must not cross.
Tool Calling
Typed tool interfaces, narrow parameters and per-tool authorisation.
Multi-Agent Systems
Coordination, hand-off and whether more agents actually help.
LLM Evaluation
Held-out sets, rubric judging, CI gates and production sampling.
AI Observability
Logging prompts, versions, retrieved context and cost per request.
Guardrails
Deterministic checks on input and output that fail closed.
Prompt Injection Defence
Breaking the private-data, untrusted-input, outbound-channel combination.
AI Cost Management
Token accounting, routing, caching and the context-window budget.
Human in the Loop
Gating by reversibility and blast radius, and avoiding approval fatigue.
ML Platform
Feature stores, training pipelines, registries and deployment.