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177: Vector Databases

Programming Throwdown

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Intro topic: Buying a Car

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Tool of the Show

Topic: Vector Databases (~54 min)

  • How computers represent data traditionally
    • ASCII values
    • RGB values
  • How traditional compression works
    • Huffman encoding (tree structure)
    • Lossy example: Fourier Transform & store coefficients
  • How embeddings are computed
    • Pairwise (contrastive) methods
    • Forward models (self-supervised)
  • Similarity metrics
  • Approximate Nearest Neighbors (ANN)
  • Sub-Linear ANN
    • Clustering
    • Space Partitioning (e.g. K-D Trees)
  • What a vector database does
    • Perform nearest-neighbors with many different similarity metrics
    • Store the vectors and the data structures to support sub-linear ANN
    • Handle updates, deletes, rebalancing/reclustering, backups/restores
  • Examples
    • pgvector: a vector-database plugin for postgres
    • Weaviate, Pinecone
    • Milvus

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186 episodes