Keeping RAG and product data together with PostgreSQL
For many products, pgvector is compelling because retrieval can live beside the structured data the application already depends on.
21 Sep 2026 · 7 min
Reduce infrastructure before increasing it
A separate vector system can be valuable at scale, but it also creates another security, deployment and observability boundary. PostgreSQL is often a pragmatic starting point.
Retrieval is more than similarity
Useful retrieval combines semantic search with ownership, module, organization and freshness filters. Relational data makes those constraints explicit.
Measure the full answer path
Chunk quality, filters, ranking, prompt context and model behavior all affect the result. Evaluate retrieval and generation separately before tuning either one.
See the engineering decisions applied in a real project.
Academic Chatbot Platform case study