Vector Databases and Semantic Search Implementation
Chapter 1: Embeddings and Vector Spaces
From Data to Vectors: A Refresher
Survey of Embedding Models
Understanding Vector Dimensionality
Introduction to Dimensionality Reduction
Measuring Similarity in Vector Space
Hands-on Practical: Generating and Comparing Embeddings
Quiz for Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Introducing Vector Databases
What Defines a Vector Database?
Core Architectural Components
Data Models and Schemas
Vector Operations: CRUD
Metadata Filtering
Scaling Considerations
Hands-on Practical: Basic Vector DB Interaction
Quiz for Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) Search
The Need for Approximation
Core Concepts of ANN
Algorithm Overview: HNSW
Algorithm Overview: IVF
Algorithm Overview: LSH
Indexing Parameters and Tuning
Evaluating ANN Performance
Hands-on Practical: Experimenting with Index Parameters
Quiz for Chapter 3
Chapter 4: Building Semantic Search Systems
Semantic vs. Keyword Search Revisited
Architecture of a Semantic Search Pipeline
Data Preparation and Chunking Strategies
Query Processing and Embedding
Result Ranking and Re-ranking
Implementing Hybrid Search
Evaluating Semantic Search Relevance
Hands-on Practical: Designing a Search Query Flow
Quiz for Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Vector Databases in Practice
Choosing a Vector Database Platform
Working with Pinecone Client
Working with Weaviate Client
Working with Milvus Client
Working with ChromaDB Client
Indexing Large Datasets Efficiently
Monitoring and Maintenance
Hands-on Practical: Build a Small Semantic Search App
Quiz for Chapter 5
Working with Weaviate Client
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- Weaviate Documentation: Python Client, Schema, Data Management, and Querying, Weaviate Team, 2024 (Weaviate) - Official documentation covering installation, connection, schema definition, CRUD operations, and querying with the Python client, including details on vectorizers and search types.
- Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks, Nils Reimers and Iryna Gurevych, 2019 Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Association for Computational Linguistics) DOI: 10.18653/v1/D19-1410 - Introduces Sentence-BERT, a method for generating high-quality sentence embeddings, relevant to how Weaviate's
text2vec-transformersmodule might operate for semantic search.