RAG & MCP

MCP Architecture

MCP architecture deep dive: client-server model, protocol layers, message types, and connection lifecycle.

Last updated 2026-06-11

Role	What It Is	Examples
Host	The LLM application the user interacts with. Contains one or more MCP clients	Claude Desktop, VS Code, Cursor, your custom app
Client	A connector within the host that maintains a 1:1 stateful session with a single MCP server	One client per connected MCP server. Handles capability negotiation
Server	A service that exposes tools, resources, and prompts. Wraps databases, APIs, file systems	Your CRM server, your Jira server, a DB query server

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture explained: ingestion pipeline, vector search, prompt augmentation, and production patterns.

Document processing for RAG pipelines: PDF parsing, OCR, table extraction, and multi-modal document understanding.

Text chunking strategies for RAG: fixed-size, semantic, recursive, and document-aware chunking with performance comparisons.

Embedding models and vector indexing for RAG: choosing embeddings, HNSW vs IVF, dimensionality, and index optimization.

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