You now have the complete pgvector lifecycle: relational foundations, embedding provenance, exact and approximate search, ingestion, hybrid retrieval, evaluation, RAG, memory, security, production operations, scaling, deployment, and capstones. Mastery comes from operating these ideas together, measuring real outcomes, explaining tradeoffs, and recovering safely—not memorizing one index command.
Repeat the governed RAG capstone, add a second domain and language, conduct retrieval ablations, and own citation plus injection evaluation.
Operate a production-shaped snapshot: load, index, vacuum, back up, restore, fail over, migrate models, tune filtered ANN, and write incident runbooks.
Expand the golden dataset, study information-retrieval metrics, compare embedding/reranking models, analyze failures by slice, and reproduce experiments statistically.
Complete the memory capstone, formalize capability policies, add approval and idempotency, and red-team every indirect instruction path.
Run the pgvector-versus-specialist proof, cost model, threat model, recovery review, and launch checklist with independent reviewers.
Pin versions, subscribe to PostgreSQL and pgvector release notes, read migration notes before upgrades, rerun golden evaluations, rehearse recovery, and schedule architecture reviews when data shape, model, workload, regulation, or provider changes. Update internal runbooks with evidence from incidents and experiments.
Teach one chapter without notes. Run one capstone from a clean environment. Diagnose an injected failure. Defend a metric and index choice. Demonstrate cross-tenant denial and deletion. Restore the database. Present the speed–recall–cost curve and known limitations to a skeptical reviewer.
Assess my pgvector mastery through a practical oral exam. Ask one question each on schema, vector math, exact/ANN search, hybrid retrieval, ingestion races, evaluation, RAG safety, RLS, operations, scaling, and recovery. Require commands, evidence, and tradeoffs. Then propose one capstone improvement based on my weakest area.
Verification contract: Do not accept vocabulary alone; require a runnable artifact, failure diagnosis, or decision backed by measured evidence.