Do You Really Need to Export Confluence Content and Store It in a Vector Database for a Confluence-Based RAG?

Until recently, I believed that creating a Confluence-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system required exporting all Confluence content and storing it in a vector database. This assumption led to numerous questions and challenges:

• How do I manage access rights to the exported content?
• How can I keep the content up to date?
• What is the optimal chunk size other parameters .. ?

These concerns were not only daunting but also time-consuming, making the task seem more complicated than it might be worth.

The Unexpected Shortcut

Today, everything changed. I decided to explore a simpler, more streamlined approach, and the results were astonishing. This shortcut not only provided answers as good as, if not better than, the traditional method but also came with several significant advantages.

The Benefits of the New Approach

With this new method, I no longer had to worry about:

• Exporting Confluence Content: The cumbersome process of exporting data was eliminated.
• Keeping Content Up to Date: No more concerns about constantly updating the exported data to reflect the latest changes.
• Managing Access Rights: Simplified management without the need for complex access control mechanisms.

Performance and Efficiency

What truly impressed me was the performance of this model. It reached an exceptionally high level of efficiency and accuracy, rivaling the traditional export-based method. While the conventional approach might offer a slight increase in performance, the marginal gain is minimal compared to the significant reduction in effort and complexity.

A Question of Context

Ultimately, the decision comes down to the specific context in which you operate. Is the minor performance boost worth the additional hassle of exporting and managing content? For me, the answer was clear: the new, simplified approach provided substantial benefits without the extra headaches.

This experience taught me that sometimes, exploring alternative methods can lead to surprising and highly rewarding outcomes.