Knowledge Bases
Overview
A knowledge base is your own collection of documents, indexed so a model can retrieve and use them at request time through RAG. You manage knowledge bases from a dedicated screen — create, update, and delete them independently of any API proxy.
How a Knowledge Base Is Built
Give it a name and description so you can reference it when configuring RAG.
Upload text or PDF files. PDF content is automatically extracted to text; if a single document fails to extract, the rest of the upload still succeeds.
Each document is automatically split into smaller passages sized for retrieval, rather than being searched as one large block of text.
Chunks are embedded and stored in your vector database, ready to be searched at request time.
View, update, or delete documents and chunks from the knowledge base screen at any time.
A Lighter Alternative to Fine-Tuning
Fine-tuning bakes knowledge into a model and requires retraining every time your data changes. A knowledge base lets you add, update, or remove information at any time — the next request simply retrieves the latest content, with no retraining or redeployment of the model itself.
Using a Knowledge Base
Once created, a knowledge base is attached to a RAG policy so incoming requests can retrieve from it — see Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). A single request can also be scoped to one specific knowledge base rather than every knowledge base in a project.
Deleting a knowledge base is not blocked by any dependency check. The delete confirmation shows, best-effort, how many RAG policies currently reference the knowledge base — but that count is informational only, not a gate: whether it loads or not (it silently shows nothing if the lookup fails), confirming Delete removes the knowledge base immediately.
Deletion also permanently purges the knowledge base's records from the vector database. If no other knowledge base shares its collection, the entire collection is removed; if one does, only this knowledge base's own records are removed and the shared collection is preserved.
If a deployed RAG policy still references the deleted knowledge base or its collection, that policy starts failing — and blocking — every subsequent request; see the fail-closed behavior on the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) page. Update or remove any RAG policy that depends on a knowledge base before deleting it.
Knowledge bases and their documents can also be managed through the APIops REST API; see API Reference: Knowledge Bases.