{VectorStore Name}

Author: Author Name
Design: Designer
Peer Review: Reviewer Name
This is a part of LangChain Open Tutorial

Overview

This tutorial covers how to use {Vector Store Name} with LangChain .

{A short introduction to vectordb}

This tutorial walks you through using CRUD operations with the {VectorDB} storing , updating , deleting documents, and performing similarity-based retrieval .

References

Environment Setup

Set up the environment. You may refer to Environment Setup for more details.

[Note]

langchain-opentutorial is a package that provides a set of easy-to-use environment setup, useful functions and utilities for tutorials.
You can checkout the langchain-opentutorial for more details.

%%capture --no-stderr
%pip install langchain-opentutorial

# Install required packages
from langchain_opentutorial import package

package.install(
    [
        "langsmith",
        "langchain-core",
        "python-dotenv",
    ],
    verbose=False,
    upgrade=False,
)

# Set environment variables
from langchain_opentutorial import set_env

set_env(
    {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "",
        "LANGCHAIN_API_KEY": "",
        "LANGCHAIN_TRACING_V2": "true",
        "LANGCHAIN_ENDPOINT": "https://api.smith.langchain.com",
        "LANGCHAIN_PROJECT": "{Project Name}",
    }
)

You can alternatively set API keys such as OPENAI_API_KEY in a .env file and load them.

[Note] This is not necessary if you've already set the required API keys in previous steps.

from dotenv import load_dotenv

load_dotenv(override=True)

What is {vectordb}?

Please write down what you need to set up the Vectorstore here.

Data

This part walks you through the data preparation process .

This section includes the following components:

Introduce Data
Preprocessing Data

Introduce Data

In this tutorial, we will use the fairy tale 📗 The Little Prince in PDF format as our data.

This material complies with the Apache 2.0 license .

The data is used in a text (.txt) format converted from the original PDF.

You can view the data at the link below.

Data Link

Preprocessing Data

In this tutorial section, we will preprocess the text data from The Little Prince and convert it into a list of LangChain Document objects with metadata.

Each document chunk will include a title field in the metadata, extracted from the first line of each section.

from langchain.schema import Document
from langchain.text_splitter import RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter
import re
from typing import List

def preprocessing_data(content:str)->List[Document]:
    # 1. Split the text by double newlines to separate sections
    blocks = content.split("\n\n")

    # 2. Initialize the text splitter
    text_splitter = RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter(
        chunk_size=500,              # Maximum number of characters per chunk
        chunk_overlap=50,            # Overlap between chunks to preserve context
        separators=["\n\n", "\n", " "]  # Order of priority for splitting
    )

    documents = []

    # 3. Loop through each section
    for block in blocks:
        lines = block.strip().splitlines()
        if not lines:
            continue

        # Extract title from the first line using square brackets [ ]
        first_line = lines[0]
        title_match = re.search(r"\[(.*?)\]", first_line)
        title = title_match.group(1).strip() if title_match else ""

        # Remove the title line from content
        body = "\n".join(lines[1:]).strip()
        if not body:
            continue

        # 4. Chunk the section using the text splitter
        chunks = text_splitter.split_text(body)

        # 5. Create a LangChain Document for each chunk with the same title metadata
        for chunk in chunks:
            documents.append(Document(page_content=chunk, metadata={"title": title}))

    print(f"Generated {len(documents)} chunked documents.")

    return documents

# Load the entire text file
with open("./data/the_little_prince.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    content = f.read()

# Preprocessing Data
docs = preprocessing_data(content=content)

Initial Setting {vectordb}

This part walks you through the initial setup of {vectordb} .

This section includes the following components:

Load Embedding Model
Load {vectordb} Client

Load Embedding Model

In the Load Embedding Model section, you'll learn how to load an embedding model.

This tutorial uses OpenAI's API-Key for loading the model.

💡 If you prefer to use another embedding model, see the instructions below.

Embedding Models

import os
from langchain_openai import OpenAIEmbeddings

embedding = OpenAIEmbeddings(model="text-embedding-3-large")

Load {vectordb} Client

In the Load {vectordb} Client section, we cover how to load the database client object using the Python SDK for {vectordb} .

Python SDK Docs

# Create Database Client Object Function
def get_db_client():
    """
    Initializes and returns a VectorStore client instance.

    This function loads configuration (e.g., API key, host) from environment
    variables or default values and creates a client object to interact
    with the {vectordb} Python SDK.

    Returns:
        client:ClientType - An instance of the {vectordb} client.

    Raises:
        ValueError: If required configuration is missing.
    """
    return client

# Get DB Client Object
client = get_db_client()

Document Manager

To support the Langchain-Opentutorial , we implemented a custom set of CRUD functionalities for VectorDBs.

The following operations are included:

upsert : Update existing documents or insert if they don’t exist
upsert_parallel : Perform upserts in parallel for large-scale data
similarity_search : Search for similar documents based on embeddings
delete : Remove documents based on filter conditions

Each of these features is implemented as class methods specific to each VectorDB.

In this tutorial, you can easily utilize these methods to interact with your VectorDB.

We plan to continuously expand the functionality by adding more common operations in the future.

Create Instance

First, we create an instance of the {vectordb} helper class to use its CRUD functionalities.

This class is initialized with the {vectordb} Python SDK client instance and the embedding model instance , both of which were defined in the previous section.

# crud_manager = <Your Vectordb Class>(client=client, embedding=embedding)

Now you can use the following CRUD operations with the crud_manager instance.

These instance allow you to easily manage documents in your {vectordb} .

Upsert Document

Update existing documents or insert if they don’t exist

✅ Args

texts : Iterable[str] – List of text contents to be inserted/updated.
metadatas : Optional[List[Dict]] – List of metadata dictionaries for each text (optional).
ids : Optional[List[str]] – Custom IDs for the documents. If not provided, IDs will be auto-generated.
**kwargs : Extra arguments for the underlying vector store.

🔄 Return

None

from uuid import uuid4

args = {
    "texts": [doc.page_content for doc in docs[:2]],
    "metadatas": [doc.metadata for doc in docs[:2]],
    "ids": [str(uuid4()) for _ in docs[:2]]
    # if you want args, add params.
}

# crud_manager.upsert(**args)

Upsert Parallel Document

Perform upserts in parallel for large-scale data

✅ Args

texts : Iterable[str] – List of text contents to be inserted/updated.
metadatas : Optional[List[Dict]] – List of metadata dictionaries for each text (optional).
ids : Optional[List[str]] – Custom IDs for the documents. If not provided, IDs will be auto-generated.
batch_size : int – Number of documents per batch (default: 32).
workers : int – Number of parallel workers (default: 10).
**kwargs : Extra arguments for the underlying vector store.

🔄 Return

None

from uuid import uuid4

args = {
    "texts": [doc.page_content for doc in docs],
    "metadatas": [doc.metadata for doc in docs],
    "ids": [str(uuid4()) for _ in docs]
    # if you want args, add params.
}

# crud_manager.upsert_parallel(**args)

Similarity Search

Search for similar documents based on embeddings .

This method uses "cosine similarity" .

✅ Args

query : str – The text query for similarity search.
k : int – Number of top results to return (default: 10).

**kwargs : Additional search options (e.g., filters).

🔄 Return

results : List[Document] – A list of LangChain Document objects ranked by similarity.

# Search by Query
# results = crud_manager.search(query="What is essential is invisible to the eye.",k=3)
# for idx,doc in enumerate(results):
#     print(f"Rank {idx} | Title : {doc.metadata['title']}")
#     print(f"Contents : {doc.page_content}")
#     print()

# Filter Search
# results = crud_manager.search(query="Which asteroid did the little prince come from?",k=3,<filters>={"title":"Chapter 4"})
# for idx,doc in enumerate(results):
#     print(f"Rank {idx} | Title : {doc.metadata['title']}")
#     print(f"Contents : {doc.page_content}")
#     print()

as_retriever

The as_retriever() method creates a LangChain-compatible retriever wrapper.

This function allows a DocumentManager class to return a retriever object by wrapping the internal search() method, while staying lightweight and independent from full LangChain VectorStore dependencies.

The retriever obtained through this function can be used the same as the existing LangChain retriever and is compatible with LangChain Pipeline(e.g. RetrievalQA,ConversationalRetrievalChain,Tool,...).

✅ Args

search_fn : Callable - The function used to retrieve relevant documents. Typically this is self.search from a DocumentManager instance.
search_kwargs : Optional[Dict] - A dictionary of keyword arguments passed to search_fn, such as k for top-K results or metadata filters.

🔄 Return

LightCustomRetriever :BaseRetriever - A lightweight LangChain-compatible retriever that internally uses the given search_fn and search_kwargs.

# Basic Search without filters
ret = crud_manager.as_retriever(
    search_fn=crud_manager.search, search_kwargs={"k": 1}
)

ret.invoke("Which asteroid did the little prince come from?")

# Search with title filter
ret = crud_manager.as_retriever(
    search_fn=crud_manager.search,
    search_kwargs={
        "k": 2,
        "where": {"title": "Chapter 4"}  # Filter to only search in Chapter 4
    }
)

print("Example 2: Search with title filter (Chapter 4)")
print(ret.invoke("Which asteroid did the little prince come from?"))

Delete Document

Remove documents based on filter conditions

✅ Args

ids : Optional[List[str]] – List of document IDs to delete. If None, deletion is based on filter.
filters : Optional[Dict] – Dictionary specifying filter conditions (e.g., metadata match).
**kwargs : Any additional parameters.

🔄 Return

None

# Delete by ids
# ids = [] # The 'ids' value you want to delete
# crud_manager.delete(ids=ids)

# Delete by ids with filters
# ids = [] # The `ids` value corresponding to chapter 6
# crud_manager.delete(ids=ids,filters={"title":"chapter 6"})

# Delete All
# crud_manager.delete()

PreviousFaiss Next10-Retriever

Last updated 1 month ago

Overview

Table of Contents

References

Environment Setup

What is {vectordb}?

Data

Introduce Data

Preprocessing Data

Initial Setting {vectordb}

Load Embedding Model

Load {vectordb} Client

Document Manager

Create Instance

Upsert Document

Upsert Parallel Document

Similarity Search

as_retriever

Delete Document