Topic 6: Abstraction
16 min read·21 Sept 2026
6.1 The Retriever Interface: A Vector DB Is Not a Special Case
Intuition: your RAG app should ask "give me the best passages for this question, within these limits", not "run a Qdrant HNSW query". Whether the answer comes from a vector store, a keyword index, a SQL table, or a mix is an implementation detail.