Weaviate 1.18 is here

Hello Weaviate friends, 🤗We have exciting news: Weaviate v1.18 is LIVE!!!So, let's get right into it.

Weaviate 1.18

The engineering team and the community worked hard to deliver the best and most exciting Weaviate version yet. In v1.18 you can look forward to:

1. Faster Filtering with Roaring Bitmaps – a huge speed boost for queries combining scalar filter (where) with vector search (i.e. nearText, hybrid).

2. HNSW-PQ – enables great performance at a fraction of the previous RAM requirements.

3. Improvements to BM25 and Hybrid Search – faster scoring with the WAND implementation and added filter support.

4. Replication – two new replication features: tunable consistency for all read and write REST operations, and repair on read.

5. Cursor API – simple way to export every object from Weaviate.

6. Azure Storage backup module – extends our cloud-native backup capabilities further by introducing the backup-azure module.

You can read all about it in the Weaviate 1-18 release blog post.

Many contributors

Looking at the release notes, it took 18 different contributors to make this release happen.

With seven new contributors (internal and external) joining the proud ranks of people who can call themselves "Weaviate creators". 😊

It is great to see contributions from the Go community. I want to give a big shout to Oleksandr Redko – for the PR to "Add missing calls to file.Close()" – and Eng Zer Jun – for the PR to "use t.Setenv to set env vars".

Weaviate Air – all about Weaviate 1.18

Today at 5pm CET / 11am EST / 8am PST we will host a new episode of Weaviate Air, where we will talk about and demo the new Weaviate 1.18 features.

Join us live or watch the recording here. If you join us live, don't be shy and say hi, and feel free to fire any (related 😉) questions you may have.

Updated styling for blogs, docs and podcasts

We've updated the style for our blogs, docs and podcasts. To make all the essential content more readable and findable. What do you think? Pretty neat... right?

A cool trick - "night and day"

Did you know you can change the website between dark and light modes?If you don't do anything, the website will change to the mode indicated by your operating system.

This even works for some of the pictures. Try changing the theme while you read the latest blog. This may not change your life just yet, but it is pretty to look at. 😉

Content

Blogs

• ✍️ read Weaviate 1.18 release – to learn about Roaring Bitmaps, HNSW-PQ, Improvements to Hybrid and BM25, Replication updates, Cursor API, and Added Support for Backups on Azure 🚀

• ✍️ read The solution to TL;DRs - Weaviate's summarizer module – by JP, to learn about the Summarizer module. Heck, the article even includes a TL;DR of itself... how very meta. 🤔

• ✍️ read Combining LangChain and Weaviate – by Erika, this is a really hot topic 🔥. Learn how to use LangChain and Weaviate together. 🤯

Podcast

• 🎙 (watch and listen) – LangChain and Weaviate – with Harrison Chase

• 🎙 (watch and listen) – GPT Index and Weaviate – with Jerry Liu

• 🎙 (watch and listen) – On Information Retrieval Science – with Leo Boystov

• 🎙 (watch and listen) – On OpenVerkiezingenNL, a Weaviate-powered service to search through Dutch politician statements – with Floris Hoogenboom

• 🎙 (watch and listen) – Weaviate 1.18 – with Etienne Dilocker

Did you know that we have a Spotify playlist for Weaviate podcasts?No?... Well... now you do. 😆

Thank you

Thank you for reading this far.I hope Weaviate 1.18 brings you a lot of joy. 🤗Thank you, and see you in two weeks,Sebastian