About the author
Benjamin Trent is a Lucene committer and member of the project management committee at The Apache Software Foundation and a software engineer at Elastic, where he works on improving Elasticsearch.
Author’s articles
January 6, 2025
Optimized Scalar Quantization: Even Better Binary Quantization
Here we explain optimized scalar quantization in Elasticsearch and how we used it to improve Better Binary Quantization (BBQ).
December 27, 2024
Lucene bug adventures: Fixing a corrupted index exception
Sometimes, a single line of code takes days to write. Here, we get a glimpse of an engineer's pain and debugging over multiple days to fix a potential Apache Lucene index corruption.
November 18, 2024
Better Binary Quantization vs. Product Quantization
Why we chose to spend time working on better binary quantization instead of product quantization in Lucene and Elasticsearch.
November 11, 2024
Better Binary Quantization (BBQ) in Lucene and Elasticsearch
How Better Binary Quantization works in Lucene and Elasticsearch.
August 27, 2024
Looking back: Elastic's vector search improvements in Elasticsearch & Lucene
Looking back at Elastic's vector search innovations in Elasticsearch and Lucene.
July 17, 2024
Bit vectors in Elasticsearch
Discover what are bit vectors, their practical implications and how to use them in Elasticsearch.
April 26, 2024
Making Elasticsearch and Lucene the best vector database: up to 8x faster and 32x efficient
Discover the recent enhancements and optimizations that notably improve vector search performance in Elasticsearch & Lucene vector database.
April 25, 2024
Understanding Int4 scalar quantization in Lucene
This blog explains how int4 quantization works in Lucene, how it lines up, and the benefits of using int4 quantization.
April 25, 2024
Scalar quantization optimized for vector databases
Optimizing scalar quantization for the vector database use case allows us to achieve significantly better performance for the same retrieval quality at high compression ratios.