Title: Discussion 3 — Picking Your Engine
Course: AIINFRA 301: Production RAG & LLMOps — Observability and Evaluation > Section: Week 03 — Vector Database Selection: Qdrant, Milvus, Weaviate, and pgvector

💬 Discussion 3 — Picking Your Engine (20 pts)

Think about your current team's infrastructure — or, if you're not currently working with one, imagine a hypothetical startup building its first RAG application. Given that context, which of the four engines from this week (pgvector, Qdrant, Weaviate, or Milvus) would you choose, and what single constraint — scale, filtering needs, operational overhead, or hosting/managed-service availability — made that decision for you? Be specific: name the constraint, explain why it outweighed the other factors, and reference at least one concept or number from the lecture (e.g., a latency benchmark, the pgvector dimension cap, or Milvus's GPU ingestion advantage) to support your reasoning. Respond to at least two classmates — ideally classmates who picked a different engine than you did — and challenge or build on their reasoning with a follow-up question or a scenario where their choice might not hold up.