HNSW

Prerequisite: Familiarity with the concepts introduced in Part 2 — Ingestion Chunking. Review it first if the terminology in this part is unfamiliar. In Part 2: Data Ingestion & Atomic Chunking - Bringing Product Data into the AI Environment, we established a clean data synchronization pipeline from PostgreSQL to Qdrant via Kafka CDC. But the journey of building a standard e-commerce search engine has just begun. When a user enters: “Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 laptop under $1500 in stock” ...

Building a Custom Golang Vector Database Engine with HNSW Answer-first: Building a custom Go vector database engine with Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graphs enables high-throughput vector similarity indexing, memory-mapped SIMD distance calculations, and fast ANN retrieval. Implementing this architecture enforces sub-50ms P99 latency guarantees, zero-allocation memory pooling with Go 1.24 unique.Handle, and fault-tolerant Dapr 1.15 component orchestration for resilient production scaling. Building a custom Go vector database engine with HNSW combines 256-bit SIMD AVX2 loop unrolling, off-heap mmap zero-GC slab memory, and Product Quantization (PQ-32) to get high recall at low latency while cutting vector RAM footprint dramatically. This post covers: ...