ABAP Vector Search Library

The ABAP Vector Search Library is a Vector Database developed entirely in ABAP, designed to offer an independent solution without relying on external vector databases. It's particularly tailored for the "chat with your documents" scenario, enabling the slicing of documents into manageable chunks and the injection of these semantically relevant segments into user prompts. This approach facilitates an interactive and efficient method for handling and responding to user queries within document-based systems.

The library employs the RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) technique, which is integral to its functionality, enhancing the interaction between users and document data.

RAG is the technique that is powering the “chat with your documents” scenario:

• Slice documents into chunks
• Inject semantically relevant chunks into the Prompt:

Considering only information below:
###
{chunk01}
{chunk02}
{chunk03}
###
please provide response to the following request: 
{query from user}

How it works? Why it works? O_O

Explained here:

• as LinkedIn article: Vector DB in pure ABAP (any DB):
• a draft of the above article:implementation.

Stats

Some stats:

Optimization: initially it was ~3000μs for one floating-point unquantized comparison, using 1b quantization and bitwise operation it was optimized down to ~20μs, so we easily can do dot product (i.e.: do brute force search): for ~50000 vectors per second.

For RAG with the context window of 32k it is more than enough ^_^

Memory footprint

Floating point variable (f) takes 8 bytes in memory, one floating-point vector: 1536 * 8 = 12288 bytes (~12kb). Quantized vector takes 192 bytes.

1GB gives us 87 thousands fp-vectors or 5.5 millions quantized vectors.

Memory footprint is 64 times less. Nice! =)

Sample Usage

Query DB:

show code...

    DATA(lo_lib) = zcl_vdb_002_lib=>new( ). "instantiate library

    DATA(ls_v) = lo_lib->read_vector( id ). "read vector from DB by its GUID
    DATA(lt_q) = lo_lib->query( ls_v-q1b ). "query DB with the quantized 1536-dimensional vector

    cl_demo_output=>display( lt_q ). "observe ranked result

Answer with RAG:

show code...

    DATA(lo_e) = zcl_vdb_002_embedding_full=>new( ). "using https://github.com/microsoft/aisdkforsapabap

    DATA(lv_text) = 'Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything'.

* Embed and save text, retrieve ID
    DATA(lv_id_q) = lo_e->embed_and_save( lv_text )-id.
    COMMIT WORK AND WAIT.

* Generate an answer as vector
    DATA(lx_a) = lo_e->answer( lv_text ).
*--------------------------------------------------------------------*
    DATA(lo_lib) = zcl_vdb_002_lib=>new( ).
    DATA(lt_q) = lo_lib->query_by_id( lv_id_q ). "get chunks semantically close to the question
* Query for answers
    DATA(lt_a) = lo_lib->query( lx_a ).          "get chunks semantically close to the "modelled answer"

* Combine, sort, and remove duplicates from query results
    DATA(lt_all) = lt_q.
    APPEND LINES OF lt_a TO lt_all.
    SORT lt_all BY id.
    DELETE ADJACENT DUPLICATES FROM lt_all.

* Prepare for RAG (Retrieve and Generate) method
    DATA: lv_prompt TYPE string.
    DATA: lt_used TYPE zcl_vdb_002_lib=>tt_vector.

* Execute RAG with text and combined results, get prompt and used vectors
    DATA(lv_rag_answer) = lo_e->rag(
                            EXPORTING iv_ = lv_text
                                      it_ = lt_all
                            IMPORTING ev_prompt = lv_prompt
                                      et_used   = lt_used
    ).

    cl_demo_output=>write( lv_rag_answer ). "observe RAG answer
    cl_demo_output=>write( lv_prompt ).     "check out the resulting prompt
    cl_demo_output=>display(  ).

Dependencies

The library is self-contained for the core functionality of the Vector Search. However if you want to generate embeddings, you might want to install this OpenAI ABAP SDK.

To instantiate SDK you might need to use your own private keys, you can store them locally in a simple key-value .env file, something like:

#https://<subdomain>.openai.azure.com/openai/deployments/<api_dep>/chat/completions?api-version=2023-07-01-preview
#https://<subdomain>.openai.azure.com/openai/deployments/<api_dep>/chat/completions?api-version=<API_VER>
API_URL=https://<subdomain>.openai.azure.com/
API_VER=2023-07-01-preview
API_KEY=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
API_DEP=<deployment_id>
API_DEP_EMBED=<deployment_id_embedding_model>

show code...

    DATA(lo_) = zcl_vdb_000_dotenv=>new( lv_path ).
    DATA(lv_api_key) = cut->v( 'API_KEY' ).

    data(ls_) = VALUE ts_env(
      api_url       = lo_->v( k = 'API_URL' )
      api_ver       = lo_->v( k = 'API_VER' )
      api_key       = lo_->v( k = 'API_KEY' )
      api_dep       = lo_->v( k = 'API_DEP' )
      api_dep_embed = lo_->v( k = 'API_DEP_EMBED' )
    ).

Installation

Install this repository using abapGit.

• Run the report zvdb_002_demo_01_upload to upload sample vector embeddings from sample_embeddings.tsv.
• Now you can use zvdb_002_demo_02_query to query DB.
• zvdb_002_demo_03_reindex to recalibrate heuristic hyperplane hash and reindex.

© 2023 Alice Vinogradova. For more information, see the LICENSE file in this repository.