Lesson 2: Choosing a vector store and keeping it swappable
23 min read·13 Oct 2026
Module 5 · Lesson 2 · About 45 minutes · Needs: Lesson 1 (flat search, HNSW, recall@10) and Module 4 Lesson 1 (bge-small vectors)
The situation
Lesson 1 kept Hollin's vectors in memory: restart the notebook and they are gone. Grace's plan is Colab notebooks now and a PostgreSQL service in Module 14. Kwame asks: which store now, and how do we move later without rewriting retrieval?
This lesson stores Hollin's documents in six stores, sends Ellie Shaw's question, "the smoothie maker stopped and felt hot", to each, and hides them behind one interface. The Hollin data is simulated.