Architecting Scalable Vector Database Indexing Strategies for Real‑Time Retrieval‑Augmented Generation Systems
Introduction Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the de‑facto paradigm for building large‑language‑model (LLM) applications that need up‑to‑date, factual knowledge. In a RAG pipeline, a vector database stores dense embeddings of documents, code snippets, or multimodal artifacts. At inference time the system performs a nearest‑neighbor search to retrieve the most relevant pieces of information, which are then fed to the LLM prompt. While a single‑node vector store can handle toy examples, production‑grade RAG services must satisfy: ...