Skip to contents

Retrieve chunks from a RagnarStore

Source: R/retrieve.R
ragnar_retrieve.Rd

ragnar_retrieve() is a thin wrapper around ragnar_retrieve_vss_and_bm25() using the recommended best practices.

Usage

ragnar_retrieve(store, text, top_k = 3L)

Arguments

store

A RagnarStore object or a dplyr::tbl() derived from it. When you pass a tbl, you may use usual dplyr verbs (e.g. filter(), slice()) to restrict the rows examined before similarity scoring. Avoid dropping essential columns such as text, embedding, origin, and hash.

text

A string to find the nearest match too

top_k

Integer, the number of nearest entries to find per method.

Value

A dataframe of retrieved chunks. Each row corresponds to an individual chunk in the store. It always contains a column named text that contains the chunks.

Pre-filtering with dplyr

The store behaves like a lazy table backed by DuckDB, so row‑wise filtering is executed directly in the database. This lets you narrow the search space efficiently without pulling data into R.

See also

Other ragnar_retrieve: ragnar_retrieve_bm25(), ragnar_retrieve_vss(), ragnar_retrieve_vss_and_bm25()

Examples

if (FALSE) { # (rlang::is_installed("dbplyr") && nzchar(Sys.getenv("OPENAI_API_KEY")))
# Basic usage
store <- ragnar_store_create(
  embed = \(x) ragnar::embed_openai(x, model = "text-embedding-3-small")
)
ragnar_store_insert(store, data.frame(text = c("foo", "bar")))
ragnar_store_build_index(store)
ragnar_retrieve(store, "foo")

# More Advanced: store metadata, retrieve with pre-filtering
store <- ragnar_store_create(
  embed = \(x) ragnar::embed_openai(x, model = "text-embedding-3-small"),
  extra_cols = data.frame(category = character())
)

ragnar_store_insert(
  store,
  data.frame(
    category = "desert",
    text = c("ice cream", "cake", "cookies")
  )
)

ragnar_store_insert(
  store,
  data.frame(
    category = "meal",
    text = c("steak", "potatoes", "salad")
  )
)

ragnar_store_build_index(store)

# simple retrieve
ragnar_retrieve(store, "carbs")

# retrieve with pre-filtering
dplyr::tbl(store) |>
  dplyr::filter(category == "meal") |>
  ragnar_retrieve("carbs")
}