Lesson 1.24mAdvanced8.7k students

Vector databases and indexes

Exact nearest-neighbour search does not scale, so vector indexes trade a little recall for a lot of speed. Knowing the trade-off keeps you out of trouble.

This lesson sits in Embeddings and Vector Search, part of Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Scratch. It assumes what came before it and leads directly into the next lesson in the module.

In this lesson you will

  • Understand approximate nearest neighbour search
  • Trade recall against latency deliberately
  • Store metadata alongside vectors for filtering

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