Weaviate 1.17 introduces replication for improved database resilience and performance, hybrid search combining dense and sparse vectors, BM25 for keyword-based search ranking, faster startup times and more efficient imports, as well as various other improvements and bug fixes. Replication enables multi-node configuration, improving availability, throughput, and enabling zero downtime upgrades. Hybrid search combines the strengths of sparse and dense vectors to deliver better search results. The BM25 operator performs case-insensitive keyword search with a ranking function based on term frequency and inverse document frequency. Faster startup times are achieved by persisting computations on disk, adjusting memtable size dynamically, and improving batch import latency.