AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is flat index?
Flat index: An index that stores vectors as-is and searches by comparing the query to every one. It gives exact results with no build step, and is a baseline for measuring how accurate approximate indexes are.
Flat index: an example
A flat index over 100,000 vectors is used to compute ground-truth neighbours for testing an HNSW index.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Full-text search
- Golden dataset
- GraphRAG
- Hallucination
- Hamming distance
- Hierarchical chunking
- HNSW
- Hybrid search
Where you learn it
Flat index is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.