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Concepts

Overview​

The Concepts section explains various aspects related to Weaviate and its architecture to help you get the most out of it. You can read these sections in any order.

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If you are after a practical guide, try the quickstart tutorial.

Core concepts​

Data structure

  • How Weaviate deals with data objects, including how they are stored, represented, and linked to each other.

Modules

  • An overview of Weaviate's module system, including what can be done with modules, existing module types, and custom modules.

Indexing

  • Read how data is indexed within Weaviate using inverted and ANN indices, and about configurable settings.

Vector indexing

  • Read more about Weaviate's vector indexing architecture, such as the HNSW algorithm, distance metrics, and configurable settings.

Weaviate Architecture​

The figure below gives a 30,000 feet view of Weaviate's architecture.

Weaviate module APIs overview

You can learn more about the individual components in this figure by following these guides:

Learn about storage inside a shard

  • How Weaviate stores data
  • How Weaviate makes writes durable
  • How an inverted index, a vector index and an object store interact with each other

Ways to scale Weaviate horizontally

  • Different motivations to scale
  • Sharding vs. Replication
  • Configuring a cluster
  • Consistency

How to plan resources

  • The roles of CPU, Memory and GPUs
  • How to size a cluster correctly
  • Speeding up specific processes
  • Preventing bottlenecks

Filtered vector search

  • Combine vector search with filters
  • Learn how combining an HNSW with an inverted index leads to high-recall, high-speed filtered queries

User-facing interfaces

  • Design philosophy behind user-facing APIs
  • Role of the REST and GraphQL APIs

Replication architecture

  • About replication
  • Weaviate's implementation
  • Use cases