---
type: entity
subtype: organization
title: "Weaviate"
description: "Open-source vector database platform whose article and diagrams Cole uses to teach naive/traditional RAG versus agentic RAG."
resource: "https://weaviate.io"
tags: [organization, vector-database, rag, teaching-resource]
videos: [the-future-of-rag-is-agentic-learn-this-strategy-now, the-ultimate-n8n-rag-ai-agent-template-local-ai-edition]
created: 2026-07-21
updated: 2026-07-21
---

# Weaviate

Weaviate is an open-source vector database platform that appears in Cole's videos mainly as a teaching resource: "the best one that I have found is this article on the we8 website which by the way we8 is a vector database platform" ([0:02:30]). (The transcripts render the name phonetically as "we8" and "we V8".) Rather than featuring Weaviate's database in a build, Cole reaches for its explainer article and, above all, its diagrams to draw the line between two flavors of retrieval.

The company's real function here is pedagogical. Cole uses the Weaviate article to define baseline retrieval: "using this article from we V8 so great resource that I'll have Linked In the description of this video diving into what naive rag is" ([0:01:32]), which grounds his treatment of [Traditional RAG](../../concepts/traditional-rag.md) and plain [RAG](../../concepts/rag.md). He then points at a second diagram to introduce the more capable pattern: "this is a gentic rag the second diagram in this we article here that I absolutely love" ([0:04:44]), his springboard into [Agentic RAG](../../concepts/agentic-rag.md). The two Weaviate diagrams, naive on one side and agentic on the other, are the visual contrast that carries much of his RAG explanation.

Because it is introduced as "a vector database platform," Weaviate also stands in for the storage-and-retrieval layer beneath RAG generally, the place where [Vector Embeddings](../../concepts/vector-embeddings.md) of [Chunking](../../concepts/chunking.md) output live and get searched. It sits in the same category as vector stores like [Chroma](../tools/chroma.md), and its material shows up in Cole's [n8n](../tools/n8n.md) RAG template walkthrough as the reference explanation for how retrieval works.

## Realizes

- [RAG](../../concepts/rag.md) - Grounding an LLM's answers by retrieving relevant documents from an external knowledge base and injecting them into the prompt at query time.
- [Traditional RAG](../../concepts/traditional-rag.md) - The classic one-shot, static RAG pipeline that embeds a query, runs a single vector similarity search, and stuffs the top chunks into the prompt.
- [Agentic RAG](../../concepts/agentic-rag.md) - Giving an agent retrieval as a tool so it decides when and how to search a knowledge base, picking strategies and issuing follow-up queries instead of a single static lookup.

## Related

- [Vector Embeddings](../../concepts/vector-embeddings.md) - Numeric representations of text that enable semantic similarity search, stored and managed in a vector database for retrieval.
- [Chunking](../../concepts/chunking.md) - Splitting source documents into appropriately sized, embeddable segments, the foundational preprocessing step that determines RAG retrieval quality.
- [Structured vs. Unstructured Data](../../concepts/structured-vs-unstructured-data.md) - Choosing the right representation for RAG, keeping tabular data queryable as SQL while formatting prose as markdown, rather than forcing everything through vector search.
- [Chroma](../tools/chroma.md) - Publisher of the technical report on context rot that Cole cites as the most practical treatment of how input tokens degrade LLM performance.
- [n8n](../tools/n8n.md) - A no-code AI automation platform for building agents and workflows that integrate with 500+ applications.

## Sources

- [The Future of RAG is Agentic - Learn this Strategy NOW](../../sources/the-future-of-rag-is-agentic-learn-this-strategy-now.md) - "[0:02:30] the best one that I have found is this article on the we8 website which by the way we8 is a vector database platform."
- [The Future of RAG is Agentic - Learn this Strategy NOW](../../sources/the-future-of-rag-is-agentic-learn-this-strategy-now.md) - "[0:04:44] this is a gentic rag the second diagram in this we article here that I absolutely love."
- [The ULTIMATE n8n RAG AI Agent Template - Local AI Edition](../../sources/the-ultimate-n8n-rag-ai-agent-template-local-ai-edition.md) - "[0:01:32] using this article from we V8 so great resource that I'll have Linked In the description of this video diving into what naive rag is."
