You Probably Don’t Need a Vector Database for Your RAG — Yet

While Retrieval Augmented Generation systems commonly use dedicated vector databases like Pinecone or Weaviate, most small-to-medium projects can achieve fast vector search using only NumPy and SciKit-Learn since vector search is essentially matrix multiplication. Testing showed that these tools can search through 1.2 million text chunks in under one-tenth of a second, making dedicated vector databases unnecessary until you need persistent storage, handle vectors exceeding server memory, or require complex metadata filtering.