Skip Vector Databases: Building Production RAG With BM25

The article challenges the industry-wide assumption that vector databases are essential for RAG by demonstrating that BM25 keyword-based retrieval achieves comparable results for domain-specific corpora while eliminating GPU costs and embedding complexity. This is particularly significant for enterprise applications like technical documentation and knowledge bases, where consistent terminology reduces the advantage of semantic embeddings. For teams prioritizing cost-efficiency and operational simplicity, this represents a practical shift in how production RAG pipelines should be architected.