The Importance of Semantics in Databases

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I'm a total database junkie, I love thinking about the various kinds of databases out there. The more I work with data, I realized that you don't need a PhD to understand enough to build a working application built on top of a database. And for me, I've hit that point where I've been lost in the world of models and hyperparameter tuning. But the more I began thinking about it, there are people who have entire PhDs in database theory, right, and their implementation.

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.

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