John Wagster

John Wagster

Senior Software Engineer

John Wagster is a software engineer at Elastic, where he works on improving Elasticsearch.

Subscribe
Articles by John Wagster
Preconditioning Vectors: Making Elasticsearch VectorDB Better Binary Quantization work for every vector
Elasticsearch Labs

Preconditioning Vectors: Making Elasticsearch VectorDB Better Binary Quantization work for every vector

Modern quantization techniques can hurt recall when using older models or embeddings that aren’t normally distributed. Learn how preconditioning fixes these vectors through random orthogonal projection, making BBQ more effective and recovering recall.

John Wagster
Low-memory benchmarking in DiskBBQ and HNSW BBQ
Elasticsearch Labs

Low-memory benchmarking in DiskBBQ and HNSW BBQ

Benchmarking Elasticsearch latency, indexing speed, and memory usage for DiskBBQ and HNSW BBQ in low-memory environments.

John Wagster
Introducing a new vector storage format: DiskBBQ
Elasticsearch Labs

Introducing a new vector storage format: DiskBBQ

Introducing DiskBBQ, an alternative to HNSW, and exploring when and why to use it.

Benjamin Trent
RaBitQ binary quantization 101
Elasticsearch Labs

RaBitQ binary quantization 101

Understand the most critical components of RaBitQ binary quantization, how it works and its benefits. This guide also covers the math behind the quantization and examples.

John Wagster