Pgvector Document Store for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

When implementing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), a capable document store is necessary. This guide will explain how to leverage a pgvector database as the document store.

Leveraging the pgvector Document Store

To utilize the Redis document store, you’ll need to include the following dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.quarkiverse.langchain4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>quarkus-langchain4j-pgvector</artifactId>
    <version>0.13.1</version>
</dependency>

This extension will check for a default datasource, ensure you have defined at least one datasource. For detailed guidance, refer to the CONFIGURE DATA SOURCES IN QUARKUS.

The pgvector store requires the dimension of the vector to be set. Add the quarkus.langchain4j.pgvector.dimension property to your application.properties file and set it to the dimension of the vector. The dimension depends on the embedding model you use. For example, AllMiniLmL6V2QuantizedEmbeddingModel produces vectors of dimension 384. OpenAI’s text-embedding-ada-002 produces vectors of dimension 1536.

Upon installing the extension, you can utilize the pgvector store using the following code:

package io.quarkiverse.langchain4j.samples;

import static dev.langchain4j.data.document.splitter.DocumentSplitters.recursive;

import java.util.List;

import jakarta.enterprise.context.ApplicationScoped;
import jakarta.inject.Inject;

import dev.langchain4j.data.document.Document;
import dev.langchain4j.model.embedding.EmbeddingModel;
import dev.langchain4j.store.embedding.EmbeddingStoreIngestor;
import io.quarkiverse.langchain4j.pgvector.PgVectorEmbeddingStore;

@ApplicationScoped
public class IngestorExampleWithPgvector {

    /**
     * The embedding store (the database).
     * The bean is provided by the quarkus-langchain4j-pgvector extension.
     */
    @Inject
    PgVectorEmbeddingStore store;

    /**
     * The embedding model (how is computed the vector of a document).
     * The bean is provided by the LLM (like openai) extension.
     */
    @Inject
    EmbeddingModel embeddingModel;

    public void ingest(List<Document> documents) {
        EmbeddingStoreIngestor ingestor = EmbeddingStoreIngestor.builder()
                .embeddingStore(store)
                .embeddingModel(embeddingModel)
                .documentSplitter(recursive(500, 0))
                .build();
        // Warning - this can take a long time...
        ingestor.ingest(documents);
    }
}

Configuration Settings

Customize the behavior of the extension by exploring various configuration options:

Configuration property fixed at build time - All other configuration properties are overridable at runtime

Configuration property

Type

Default

The name of the configured Postgres datasource to use for this store. If not set, the default datasource from the Agroal extension will be used.

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_PGVECTOR_DATASOURCE

string

The table name for storing embeddings

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_PGVECTOR_TABLE

string

embeddings

The dimension of the embedding vectors. This has to be the same as the dimension of vectors produced by the embedding model that you use. For example, AllMiniLmL6V2QuantizedEmbeddingModel produces vectors of dimension 384. OpenAI’s text-embedding-ada-002 produces vectors of dimension 1536.

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_PGVECTOR_DIMENSION

int

required

Use index or not

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_PGVECTOR_USE_INDEX

boolean

false

index size

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_PGVECTOR_INDEX_LIST_SIZE

int

0

Create table or not

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_PGVECTOR_CREATE_TABLE

boolean

true

Drop table or not

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_PGVECTOR_DROP_TABLE_FIRST

boolean

false

Under the Hood

Each ingested document is saved as a row in a Postgres table, containing the embedding column stored as a vector.