Adaptive Retrieval Economics and Unified Serving Stores

Production retrieval guidance centers on ingestion fidelity, filtered candidate coverage, predicate pushdown, lineage, incremental refresh, permissions, adaptive routing, hybrid search, reranking, and freshness. An auditable authorize-or-veto layer reported 45–46% lower tail latency at matched recall in a narrow failure band; Gemini Enterprise examples connect live RAG with persistent MemoryCorpus, while Lakebase’s 90.5% top-10 retention at 200 candidates remains workload-specific evidence.