I share search tips, blog articles, and free events I'm hosting about the search+retreval industry, vector databases, information retrieval and more.
Writes make vectorDB benchmarks fall apart
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I'm writing about the weak spots in vector databases. Where you should prod and poke when selecting a vendor. Today: Updating Vector Databases If you think about the old vector search regime, it involved
We overindexed on this paradigm, creating data structures focused on good search performance that couldn't tolerate updates. I wrote about how sensitive graph-based vector DBs in particular are to updates, picking on Lucene unfairly: https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/08/18/update-graph-vector-db -Doug --- PS don't miss out on my Building Production Agents class with Hugo Bowne Anderson on Agentic Search + Building Agents. Sign up here: https://maven.com/softwaredoug/build-enterprise-agents ---- Slack Community * Events · Consulting · Training (use code searchtips) You're subscribed to Doug Turnbull's daily search tips where I share tips, blog articles, events, and more. You can always manage your profile: |
Doug Turnbull
I share search tips, blog articles, and free events I'm hosting about the search+retreval industry, vector databases, information retrieval and more.
Hey all, Just a note tomorrow I'll be giving a talk on High-Scale Agent Memory in Turbopuffer Its a first step into a larger world! Agent memory helps new sessions feel like they're continuing a conversation not restarting one. Come, have fun, see the mistakes I've made, and get an intro to Turbopuffer. Event link - https://maven.com/p/e48f16/high-scale-agentic-memory-with-turbopuffer Cheers, -Doug Slack Community * Events · Consulting · Training (use code search-tips) You're subscribed to...
This week the Retrieval Augmented Gathering online conference continues! Last week we explored index-only SPLADE, got a demo of tensors in the search engine, and how to think of agentic memory as telemetry. This week we've got talks below: Embeddings don't solve RAG (today) Solving retrieval for agents isn't as simple as chunk + embed. For one, similarity is not relevance. An decides what's relevant depending on not just raw text, but everything that 'surrounds' it. Places it in context....
I've spent the last several years building query classifiers with LLMs. Now Jev has arrived, making this process simpler, faster, and more accurate. I decided to sit down with a simple query understanding task with Jev. It let me make better tradeoffs in recall / precision, while being an order of magnitude faster / cheaper Enjoy: https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/09/22/jev-query-understanding.html -Doug Slack Community * Events · Consulting · Training (use code search-tips) You're...