Re:You Don't Need a Vector Database
by kencho on Sunday March 08, 2026 @08:38AM
(#47296837)
Exactly. We talk to teams every week who spent a month setting up pinecone or qdrant and then realize they just needed search that worked. The vector database became the default answer to every search problem because of the RAG hype cycle, even when the actual need is way simpler
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Can you describe when the actual need is much simpler? I mean throwing documents into elastic search is really easy and the search is really good.
one use case we're handling right now is for a large online auction marketplace. they needed to automatically categorize 40,000 newly uploaded images per week. no tags, no metadata from the sellers, just raw photos. elasticsearch can't look at an image and tell you it's a vintage rolex or a mid-century lamp. they needed search that understands visual content, not text
that's the kind of problem where keyword search doesn't apply at all, no matter how good the engine is
Re:You Don't Need a Vector Database
by simonjgreen on Sunday March 08, 2026 @09:57AM
(#47297351)
> Spent a month setting up Pinecone?
Really?