The challenge of optimizing existing databases for vector solutions

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Key takeaways

Transcript

Episode notes

Existing databases have their own tech debt and architectural decisions that make it challenging to implement vector solutions from day one.
Incumbent vendors may take a significant amount of time to optimize their offerings to perform as well as purpose-built vendors.
Purpose-built offerings may have features that are not available in existing solutions.
Young solutions like Me, G-vector and Elasticsearch's vector offering may still be lacking in capabilities compared to established databases.

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.

Leave us a comment

Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

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.