Building Advanced RAG Applications with MyScaleDB and LlamaIndex

- 3 mins read

In this post, I will explore MyScaleDB, an open-source, high-performance SQL vector database built on ClickHouse, and LlamaIndex, the leading data framework for building LLM applications.

Installation

After installing VSCodium as my primary IDE, I proceeded with installing the Python extension via Marketplace Link. Next, I created the virtual environment using venv:

# Create the envrionment
python -m venv myscaledb

# Activate the environment
myscaledb\Scripts\activate

This is my requirements.txt:

langchain 
langchain_community 
pydantic
clickhouse-connect
llama-index 
llama-index-llms-ollama 
llama-index-vector-stores-myscale
llama-index-embeddings-langchain

Install all the requirement pakcages with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Preparation

After signing up an account with MyScale, click on the Clusters and from the Actions, select Connection Details:

myscaledb-connection-details

Building an RAG application

By following closely to Build An Advanced RAG Application using MyScaleDB and LlamaIndex, this is my rag.py:

from llama_index.llms.ollama import Ollama
llm = Ollama(model="llama3")

# NOTE:  I added the send_receive_timeout and connect_timeout settings to fix the write operation timeout
# SEE: https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/integrations/python#clickhouse-connect-driver-api
import clickhouse_connect
client = clickhouse_connect.get_client(
   host='xxxxxx.myscale.com',
   port=443,
   username='xxxxxx',
   password='xxxxxx',
   send_receive_timeout=600000,
   connect_timeout=600000
)

Next, download and load the data:

import requests
url = 'https://niketeam-asset-download.nike.net/catalogs/2024/2024_Nike%20Kids_02_09_24.pdf?cb=09302022'
response = requests.get(url)
with open('Nike_Catalog.pdf', 'wb') as f:
   f.write(response.content)

from llama_index.core import SimpleDirectoryReader
reader = SimpleDirectoryReader(
   input_files=["Nike_Catalog.pdf"]
)
documents = reader.load_data()

Categorize the data:

def analyze_and_assign_category(text):
   if "football" in text.lower():
       return "Football"
   elif "basketball" in text.lower():
       return "Basketball"
   elif "running" in text.lower():
       return "Running"
   else:
       return "Uncategorized"

Since I am using Ollama, pull the embedding model with ollama pull mxbai-embed-large. This is how it is used:

from langchain_community.embeddings import OllamaEmbeddings
embeddings = OllamaEmbeddings(model="mxbai-embed-large")

from llama_index.core import VectorStoreIndex, Settings
Settings.embed_model = embeddings
Settings.llm = llm

Next, creates an index:

from llama_index.vector_stores.myscale import MyScaleVectorStore
from llama_index.core import StorageContext
for document in documents:
   category = analyze_and_assign_category(document.text)
   document.metadata = {"Category": category}
   
vector_store = MyScaleVectorStore(myscale_client=client)
storage_context = StorageContext.from_defaults(vector_store=vector_store)
index = VectorStoreIndex.from_documents(
   documents, storage_context=storage_context
)

This is a sample result with this command from SQL workspace:

select * from llama_index;

myscaledb-sql-workspace

Simple Query

To test it out with a simple query:

query_engine = index.as_query_engine()
response = query_engine.query("I want a few running shoes")
print(response)

This is a sample response:

myscaledb-simple-query

Filtered Query

The query engine is configured with the metadata filter:

# Connect to the external vector store directly
index = VectorStoreIndex.from_vector_store(
   vector_store=vector_store
)

from llama_index.core.vector_stores import ExactMatchFilter, MetadataFilters
query_engine = index.as_query_engine(
   filters=MetadataFilters(
       filters=[
           ExactMatchFilter(key="Category", value="Running"),
       ]
   ),
   similarity_top_k=2,
   vector_store_query_mode="hybrid",
)
response = query_engine.query("I want a few running shoes?")
print(response.source_nodes[0].text)

This is a sample response:

myscaledb-filtered-query

Troubleshooting

Initially I wanted to self-host MyScaleDB with this docker-compose.yaml:

version: '3.7'

services:
  myscaledb:
    image: myscale/myscaledb:1.5
    tty: true
    ports:
      - '8123:8123'
      - '9000:9000'
      - '8998:8998'
      - '9363:9363'
      - '9116:9116'
    networks:
      myscaledb_network:
        ipv4_address: 10.0.0.2
    volumes:
      - C:\myscaledb\volumes\data:/var/lib/clickhouse
      - C:\myscaledb\volumes\log:/var/log/clickhouse-server
      - C:\myscaledb\volumes\config\users.d\custom_users_config.xml:/etc/clickhouse-server/users.d/custom_users_config.xml
    deploy:
      resources:
        limits:
          cpus: "4.00"
          memory: 32Gb
networks:
  myscaledb_network:
    driver: bridge
    ipam:
      driver: default
      config:
        - subnet: 10.0.0.0/24

and this custom_users_config.yaml:

<clickhouse>
  <users>
      <default>
          <password></password>
          <networks>
              <ip>::1</ip>
              <ip>127.0.0.1</ip>
              <ip>10.0.0.0/24</ip>
          </networks>
          <profile>default</profile>
          <quota>default</quota>
          <access_management>1</access_management>
          <named_collection_control>1</named_collection_control>
          <show_named_collections>1</show_named_collections>
          <show_named_collections_secrets>1</show_named_collections_secrets>
      </default>
  </users>
</clickhouse>

I tried to create the user after logging into the console:

clickhouse-client

CREATE USER myscale IDENTIFIED WITH plaintext_password BY 'myscale'
COMMIT

GRANT ALL ON *.* TO myscale WITH GRANT OPTION;
quit

But I was greeted with this error:

myscaledb-unknown-type-mstg

I realised that MSTG (Multi-scale Tree Graph) algorithm is provided through MyScale Cloud. myscaledb-mstg-through-myscale-cloud