What is the primary purpose of the DBMS_VECTOR_CHAIN.

In Oracle Database 23ai, the DBMS_VECTOR_CHAIN package supports Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows by providing utilities for vector processing. The UTL_TO_CHUNKS function specifically splits large documents into smaller, manageable text chunks. This is critical in RAG applications because embedding models (e.g., BERT, ONNX models) have token limits (e.g., 512 tokens). Splitting text minimizes token truncation, ensuring that each chunk retains full semantic meaning, which improves the quality of subsequent vector embeddings and search accuracy. Generating embeddings (A) is handled by functions like VECTOR_EMBEDDING, not UTL_TO_CHUNKS. Loading documents (B) is a separate process (e.g., via SQL*Loader). Converting to a single text string (D) contradicts the chunking purpose and risks truncation. Oracle’s documentation on DBMS_VECTOR_CHAIN emphasizes chunking for optimizing vector quality in RAG.