Three months into production, our RAG system started failing at 2AM. Not gracefully—complete outages. The problem wasn’t the models or the embeddings. It was the architecture. After rebuilding it twice, here’s what I learned about building RAG systems that actually work in production. Figure 1: Production RAG Architecture Overview The Night Everything Broke It was […]
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Vector Database Comparison: Pinecone vs Weaviate vs Qdrant vs Chroma – Choosing the Right One for Your RAG Application
Last March, a 3AM alert changed everything. Our Pinecone bill had tripled overnight, and I spent the next three months migrating between vector databases, learning hard lessons about what actually matters. Let me share what I discovered—and what I wish someone had told me. Figure 1: Comprehensive comparison of vector database options The Night Everything […]
Read more →RAG Optimization: Query Rewriting, Hybrid Search, and Re-ranking
Introduction: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds LLM responses in factual data, but naive implementations often retrieve irrelevant content or miss important information. Optimizing RAG requires attention to every stage: query understanding, retrieval strategies, re-ranking, and context integration. This guide covers practical optimization techniques: query rewriting and expansion, hybrid search combining dense and sparse retrieval, re-ranking with […]
Read more →The Complete Guide to RAG Architecture: From Fundamentals to Production
Master Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with this expert-level guide. Learn about RAG types (Naive, Advanced, Modular, Agentic), chunking strategies, embedding models, vector databases, hybrid retrieval, and production best practices with high-quality architecture diagrams.
Read more →Advanced Retrieval Strategies for RAG: The Complete Guide to Dense, Hybrid, and Multi-Stage Search
Introduction: Retrieval is the foundation of RAG systems—the quality of retrieved documents directly impacts generation quality. Different retrieval strategies excel in different scenarios: dense retrieval captures semantic similarity, sparse retrieval handles exact keyword matches, and hybrid approaches combine both. This guide covers advanced retrieval techniques: embedding-based dense retrieval, BM25 and sparse methods, hybrid search strategies, […]
Read more →Building Production RAG Applications with LangChain: From Document Ingestion to Conversational AI
Introduction: LangChain has emerged as the dominant framework for building production Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications, providing abstractions for document loading, text splitting, embedding, vector storage, and retrieval chains. By late 2023, LangChain reached production maturity with improved stability, better documentation, and enterprise-ready features. After deploying LangChain-based RAG systems across multiple organizations, I’ve found that its […]
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