docs: add retriever guide, address minor onboarding feedbacks & enhancement (#1326)

- Tried to address some onboarding feedbacks listed in
https://github.com/lancedb/lancedb/issues/1224
- Improve visibility of pydantic integration and embedding API. (Based
on onboarding feedback - Many ways of ingesting data, defining schema
but not sure what to use in a specific use-case)
- Add a guide that takes users through testing and improving retriever
performance using built-in utilities like hybrid-search and reranking
- Add some benchmarks for the above
- Add missing cohere docs

---------

Co-authored-by: Weston Pace <weston.pace@gmail.com>
This commit is contained in:
Ayush Chaurasia
2024-06-08 06:25:31 +05:30
committed by GitHub
co-authored by Weston Pace
parent 007f9c1af8
commit 76fc16c7a1
10 changed files with 372 additions and 4 deletions
+19
View File
@@ -180,6 +180,9 @@ table.
!!! info "Under the hood, LanceDB reads in the Apache Arrow data and persists it to disk using the [Lance format](https://www.github.com/lancedb/lance)."
!!! info "Automatic embedding generation with Embedding API"
When working with embedding models, it is recommended to use the LanceDB embedding API to automatically create vector representation of the data and queries in the background. See the [quickstart example](#using-the-embedding-api) or the embedding API [guide](./embeddings/)
### Create an empty table
Sometimes you may not have the data to insert into the table at creation time.
@@ -194,6 +197,9 @@ similar to a `CREATE TABLE` statement in SQL.
--8<-- "python/python/tests/docs/test_basic.py:create_empty_table_async"
```
!!! note "You can define schema in Pydantic"
LanceDB comes with Pydantic support, which allows you to define the schema of your data using Pydantic models. This makes it easy to work with LanceDB tables and data. Learn more about all supported types in [tables guide](./guides/tables.md).
=== "Typescript"
```typescript
@@ -424,6 +430,19 @@ Use the `drop_table()` method on the database to remove a table.
})
```
## Using the Embedding API
You can use the embedding API when working with embedding models. It automatically vectorizes the data at ingestion and query time and comes with built-in integrations with popular embedding models like Openai, Hugging Face, Sentence Transformers, CLIP and more.
=== "Python"
```python
--8<-- "python/python/tests/docs/test_embeddings_slow.py:imports"
--8<-- "python/python/tests/docs/test_embeddings_slow.py:openai_embeddings"
```
Learn about using the existing integrations and creating custom embedding functions in the [embedding API guide](./embeddings/).
## What's next
This section covered the very basics of using LanceDB. If you're learning about vector databases for the first time, you may want to read the page on [indexing](concepts/index_ivfpq.md) to get familiar with the concepts.