Vector databases (beyond the hype)

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!