RavenDB - High-Performance NoSQL Database

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Contextual embedding in RavenDB (or how to save 220,000,000 USD)

August 3, 2026

A while ago, MongoDB purchased VoyageAI for 220 million dollars. Since then, they have released a couple of dedicated embedding models. For example, you can read their blog post on voyage-context-4.The key premise in those sorts of models is that you can feed the model text of any size, and it will automatically handle generating embedding…

The cost of a free feature

July 10, 2026

About twenty years ago, I was working on what would eventually become RavenDB, and I needed an engine to handle queries. Writing a query engine from scratch is its own very large project, quite separate from writing a database engine. I made a decision that I still consider one of the smartest I made in those early days: I built on top of Lucene…

Multi-Agents in RavenDB

July 7, 2026

I've written before about why I think the “modern” approach of solving every problem by adding agents is a doomed path. The current instinct is to add more layers of agents, judges, reviewers, etc. - and hope the model will be smart enough to do the right thing and actually get something done.The issue is that we already have a well-understood way…

The best code is the one you shift+delete

July 3, 2026

Everyone talking about coding models fixates on the same number: how fast the thing generates code. This misses the point by a lot. The story isn't about how fast the model writes code I would have written anyway. It's that the model lets me do things that I might have done before but were expensive enough that I didn’t bother. I had three…

"Optimizing" concurrent regexes

June 19, 2026

I am looking into some regex work, and I ran into a performance problem. I need to run a particular regex over a large number (millions) of strings. That caused my spidey sense to… tingle. The code in question looked something like this:long matches = CountMatchingEntries(new Regex(@"\s+user id\s+"));Creating a regex for each invocation is……

Non obvious optimization with divide and conquer

June 16, 2026

Deep in the heart of Corax (RavenDB’s querying engine), everything deals with something called a Posting List. Posting Lists are a way for the engine to say “all of those documents have the term Fast for the field Speed”. Conceptually, a Posting List is an ordered set of document ids. In this case (and this is important, the ids in question are…

Putting Claude up against our test suite

April 29, 2026

I’m convinced that in hell, there is a special place dedicated to making engineers fix flaky tests. Not broken tests. Not tests covering a real bug. Flaky tests. Tests that pass 999 times out of 1000 and fail on the 1,000th run for no reason you can explain with a clean conscience.If you've ever shipped a reasonably complex distributed system, you…

15+ years of working with coding agents

April 27, 2026

No, the title is not a mistake, nor did I use my time travel pass to give you insights from the future. Bear with me for a moment while I explain my thinking.From individual contributor to oversight roleI started writing RavenDB in a spare bedroom, which turned into an office. The project grew from a sparkle in my head that wouldn’t let me sleep…

Expertise in the age of AI, or: Matt's Claude'll handle this

April 23, 2026

One of our team leads has been working on a major feature using Claude Code. He's been at it for a few days and is nearly done. To put that in context: this feature would normally represent about a month of a senior developer's time.He did the backend work himself — working with Claude to build it out, applying his knowledge of how the system…

Using AI agents in long-lived software projects

April 21, 2026

You read the story a hundred times: “I told Codex (or Claude, or Antigravity, etc.) to build me a full app to run my business, and 30 minutes later, it’s done”. These types of stories usually celebrate the new ecosystem and the ability to build complex systems without having to dive into the details.The benchmarks celebrate "one-shotting" entire…

Agents, Code Reviews, and the Bottleneck Shift, Oh My!

April 17, 2026

Like everything else, we have been using AI in various forms for a while now, from asking ChatGPT to write a function to asking it to explain an error, then graduating to running it on our code in the IDE, and finally to full-blown independent coding assistants. Recently, we shifted into a much higher gear, rolling it out across most of the teams…

Introducing: RavenDB Kubernetes Operator

January 15, 2026

RavenDB has recently introduced its dedicated Kubernetes Operator, a big improvement over the Helm charts that teams have been using. This is meant to streamline database orchestration and management, essentially giving you an automated "SRE-in-a-box."You can read the full announcement here. And the actual operator is available here.The Operator…