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Vector databases (beyond the hype) episode artwork

Aug 1, 2023 51 min

Vector databases (beyond the hype)

from Practical AI Hosted by Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson

There’s so much talk (and hype) these days about vector databases. We thought it would be timely and practical to have someone on the show that has been hands on with the various options and actually tried to build applications leveraging vector search. Prashanth Rao is a real practitioner that has spent and huge amount of time exploring the expanding set of vector database offerings. After introducing vector database and giving us a mental model of how they fit in with other datastores, Prashanth digs into the trade offs as related to indices, hosting options, embedding vs. query optimization, and more. Sponsors: Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster! Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today. Featuring: Prashanth Rao – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X Show Notes: Vector databases blog posts from Prashanth: (Part 1): What makes each one different? (Part 2): Understanding their internals (Part 3): Not all indexes are created equal Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

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Vector databases (beyond the hype)

0:00 51:29

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Welcome to Practical AI
  2. 0:42 Prashanth Rao
  3. 1:40 What are vector DBs
  4. 3:21 Semantics and vectors
  5. 4:20 How vectors are utilized
  6. 9:52 Evolution of NoSQL
  7. 15:51 Sponsor: Changelog News
  8. 17:52 How do we use them
  9. 20:36 Use cases for vector DBs
  10. 23:58 Over-optimizing
  11. 26:14 Tradeoffs
  12. 30:59 Mature vendors
  13. 33:04 Speedrunning the blog points
  14. 34:48 In-memory vs on-disk
  15. 40:43 Environments
  16. 44:20 Exciting things in the space
  17. 50:44 Outro

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This episode is 51 minutes long.

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This episode was published on August 1, 2023.

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