159: What Is a Vector Database? Featuring Bob van Luijt of Weaviate

Highlights from this week’s conversation include:

• How music impacted Bob’s data journey (3:16)
• Music’s relationship with creativity and innovation (11:38)
• The genesis of Weaviate and the idea of vector databases (14:09)
• The joy of creation (19:02)
• OLAP Databases (22:21)
• The progression of complexity in databases (24:31)
• Vector database (29:23)
• Scaling suboptimal algorithms (34:34)
• The future of vector space representation (35:51)
• Databases role in different industries (39:14)
• The brute force approach to discovery (45:57)
• Retrieval augmented generation (51:26)
• How generative model interacts with the database (57:55)
• Final thoughts and takeaways (1:03:20)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.