Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

17th February 2026

Research SQLite Hamming Distance Extension: Scalar vs Virtual Table — Exploring efficient Hamming distance search in SQLite for binary embeddings, this project implements both a scalar function extension and a virtual table extension as described in "Hamming Distance for Hybrid Search in SQLite". The scalar function scans and sorts rows to locate nearest matches, while the virtual table caches embeddings and leverages a max-heap to deliver top-k results up to seven times faster.
Posted 17th February 2026 at 3:56 pm

Recent articles

This is a beat by Simon Willison, posted on 17th February 2026.

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe