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Vector Search vs. Full Text Search: What Devs in Finance Need to Know

August 23, 2026

Highlights. Vector search helps teams find meaning, context, and similar concepts across large document sets. Full text search is still essential for financial applications because exact wording matters. Finance teams often need both search methods in the same application. A RAG pipeline works better when…

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Database research, frontier AI, and idiot savants, oh my!

August 21, 2026

I’m currently working on a pretty deep optimization cycle in how RavenDB and Voron (its storage engine) handle I/O. The idea is to be able to squeeze more performance out of the system by being able to utilize a lot of moving pieces at once (parallelizing compute, durable I/O, async I/O, etc.).At the end of the day, however, it all must reside on…

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Contextual embedding in RavenDB (or how to save 220,000,000 USD)

August 3, 2026

A while ago, MongoDB purchased VoyageAI for 220 million dollars. Since then, they have released a couple of dedicated embedding models. For example, you can read their blog post on voyage-context-4.The key premise in those sorts of models is that you can feed the model text of any size, and it will automatically handle generating embedding…

Articles

Four Ways RavenDB Just Made Your Life Easier

July 27, 2026

Highlights Sign in to RavenDB Studio with Google, GitHub, Microsoft Entra ID, or Windows Kerberos.Pull Azure Service Bus messages directly into RavenDB without writing consumer code. Use ETL and AI Task Health views to spot pipeline issues faster and understand where they failed.Most of what makes a database hard to run isn't the database. It's…

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The cost of a free feature

July 10, 2026

About twenty years ago, I was working on what would eventually become RavenDB, and I needed an engine to handle queries. Writing a query engine from scratch is its own very large project, quite separate from writing a database engine. I made a decision that I still consider one of the smartest I made in those early days: I built on top of Lucene…

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Multi-Agents in RavenDB

July 7, 2026

I've written before about why I think the “modern” approach of solving every problem by adding agents is a doomed path. The current instinct is to add more layers of agents, judges, reviewers, etc. - and hope the model will be smart enough to do the right thing and actually get something done.The issue is that we already have a well-understood way…

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The best code is the one you shift+delete

July 3, 2026

Everyone talking about coding models fixates on the same number: how fast the thing generates code. This misses the point by a lot. The story isn't about how fast the model writes code I would have written anyway. It's that the model lets me do things that I might have done before but were expensive enough that I didn’t bother. I had three…

Articles

No more surprises: Newest RavenDB Update

June 29, 2026

Highlights: RavenDB Cloud’s new Serverless tier auto-scales CPU up and down within a range you define. Range-based pricing helps keep cloud database costs more predictable. Azure Premium SSD v2 support lets you scale IOPS and throughput without buying larger disks. Friday. 4:55 PM. And you’re about to close your laptop (your work…

cloud azure

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"Optimizing" concurrent regexes

June 19, 2026

I am looking into some regex work, and I ran into a performance problem. I need to run a particular regex over a large number (millions) of strings. That caused my spidey sense to… tingle. The code in question looked something like this:long matches = CountMatchingEntries(new Regex(@"\s+user id\s+"));Creating a regex for each invocation is……

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Non obvious optimization with divide and conquer

June 16, 2026

Deep in the heart of Corax (RavenDB’s querying engine), everything deals with something called a Posting List. Posting Lists are a way for the engine to say “all of those documents have the term Fast for the field Speed”. Conceptually, a Posting List is an ordered set of document ids. In this case (and this is important, the ids in question are…

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Putting Claude up against our test suite

April 29, 2026

I’m convinced that in hell, there is a special place dedicated to making engineers fix flaky tests. Not broken tests. Not tests covering a real bug. Flaky tests. Tests that pass 999 times out of 1000 and fail on the 1,000th run for no reason you can explain with a clean conscience.If you've ever shipped a reasonably complex distributed system, you…

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15+ years of working with coding agents

April 27, 2026

No, the title is not a mistake, nor did I use my time travel pass to give you insights from the future. Bear with me for a moment while I explain my thinking.From individual contributor to oversight roleI started writing RavenDB in a spare bedroom, which turned into an office. The project grew from a sparkle in my head that wouldn’t let me sleep…