Astra DB (Cassandra)

DataStax Astra DB is a serverless vector-capable database built on Cassandra and made conveniently available through an easy-to-use JSON API.

In the walkthrough, we’ll demo the SelfQueryRetriever with an Astra DB vector store.

Creating an Astra DB vector store

First we’ll want to create an Astra DB VectorStore and seed it with some data. We’ve created a small demo set of documents that contain summaries of movies.

NOTE: The self-query retriever requires you to have lark installed (pip install lark). We also need the astrapy package.

%pip install --upgrade --quiet lark astrapy langchain-openai

We want to use OpenAIEmbeddings so we have to get the OpenAI API Key.

import os
from getpass import getpass

from langchain_openai.embeddings import OpenAIEmbeddings

os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"] = getpass("OpenAI API Key:")

embeddings = OpenAIEmbeddings()

API Reference:

• OpenAIEmbeddings

Create the Astra DB VectorStore:

• the API Endpoint looks like https://01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef-us-east1.apps.astra.datastax.com
• the Token looks like AstraCS:6gBhNmsk135....

ASTRA_DB_API_ENDPOINT = input("ASTRA_DB_API_ENDPOINT = ")
ASTRA_DB_APPLICATION_TOKEN = getpass("ASTRA_DB_APPLICATION_TOKEN = ")

from langchain.vectorstores import AstraDB
from langchain_core.documents import Document

docs = [
    Document(
        page_content="A bunch of scientists bring back dinosaurs and mayhem breaks loose",
        metadata={"year": 1993, "rating": 7.7, "genre": "science fiction"},
    ),
    Document(
        page_content="Leo DiCaprio gets lost in a dream within a dream within a dream within a ...",
        metadata={"year": 2010, "director": "Christopher Nolan", "rating": 8.2},
    ),
    Document(
        page_content="A psychologist / detective gets lost in a series of dreams within dreams within dreams and Inception reused the idea",
        metadata={"year": 2006, "director": "Satoshi Kon", "rating": 8.6},
    ),
    Document(
        page_content="A bunch of normal-sized women are supremely wholesome and some men pine after them",
        metadata={"year": 2019, "director": "Greta Gerwig", "rating": 8.3},
    ),
    Document(
        page_content="Toys come alive and have a blast doing so",
        metadata={"year": 1995, "genre": "animated"},
    ),
    Document(
        page_content="Three men walk into the Zone, three men walk out of the Zone",
        metadata={
            "year": 1979,
            "director": "Andrei Tarkovsky",
            "genre": "science fiction",
            "rating": 9.9,
        },
    ),
]

vectorstore = AstraDB.from_documents(
    docs,
    embeddings,
    collection_name="astra_self_query_demo",
    api_endpoint=ASTRA_DB_API_ENDPOINT,
    token=ASTRA_DB_APPLICATION_TOKEN,
)

API Reference:

• AstraDB
• Document

Creating our self-querying retriever

Now we can instantiate our retriever. To do this we’ll need to provide some information upfront about the metadata fields that our documents support and a short description of the document contents.

from langchain.chains.query_constructor.base import AttributeInfo
from langchain.llms import OpenAI
from langchain.retrievers.self_query.base import SelfQueryRetriever

metadata_field_info = [
    AttributeInfo(
        name="genre",
        description="The genre of the movie",
        type="string or list[string]",
    ),
    AttributeInfo(
        name="year",
        description="The year the movie was released",
        type="integer",
    ),
    AttributeInfo(
        name="director",
        description="The name of the movie director",
        type="string",
    ),
    AttributeInfo(
        name="rating", description="A 1-10 rating for the movie", type="float"
    ),
]
document_content_description = "Brief summary of a movie"
llm = OpenAI(temperature=0)

retriever = SelfQueryRetriever.from_llm(
    llm, vectorstore, document_content_description, metadata_field_info, verbose=True
)

API Reference:

• AttributeInfo
• OpenAI
• SelfQueryRetriever

Testing it out

And now we can try actually using our retriever!

# This example only specifies a relevant query
retriever.invoke("What are some movies about dinosaurs?")

# This example specifies a filter
retriever.invoke("I want to watch a movie rated higher than 8.5")

# This example only specifies a query and a filter
retriever.invoke("Has Greta Gerwig directed any movies about women")

# This example specifies a composite filter
retriever.invoke("What's a highly rated (above 8.5), science fiction movie ?")

# This example specifies a query and composite filter
retriever.invoke(
    "What's a movie about toys after 1990 but before 2005, and is animated"
)

Filter k

We can also use the self query retriever to specify k: the number of documents to fetch.

We can do this by passing enable_limit=True to the constructor.

retriever = SelfQueryRetriever.from_llm(
    llm,
    vectorstore,
    document_content_description,
    metadata_field_info,
    verbose=True,
    enable_limit=True,
)

# This example only specifies a relevant query
retriever.invoke("What are two movies about dinosaurs?")

Cleanup

If you want to completely delete the collection from your Astra DB instance, run this.

(You will lose the data you stored in it.)

vectorstore.delete_collection()