Skip to main content

What is Vector Database

A vector database is a type of database that indexes and stores vector embeddings for fast retrieval and similarity search, with capabilities like CRUD operations, metadata filtering, and horizontal scaling.

Information comes in many forms:

  • Some information is unstructured—like text documents, rich media, and audio.
  • Some information is structured—like application logs, tables, and graphs.

Innovations in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML):

  • Have allowed us to create a type of ML model—embedding models.
  • Embeddings encode all types of data into vectors that capture the meaning and context of an asset.
  • This allows us to find similar assets by searching for neighboring data points.

Vector search methods:

  • Allow unique experiences like taking a photograph with your smartphone and searching for similar images.

Vector databases provide:

  • The ability to store and retrieve vectors as high-dimensional points.
  • Additional capabilities for efficient and fast lookup of nearest-neighbors in the N-dimensional space.
  • They are typically powered by k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) indexes.
  • Built with algorithms like the Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) and Inverted File Index (IVF) algorithms.
  • Additional capabilities like data management, fault tolerance, authentication and access control, and a query engine.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the difference between Elastic and Enterprise Redis w.r.t "Hybrid Query" capabilities

  We'll explore scenarios involving nested queries, aggregations, custom scoring, and hybrid queries that combine multiple search criteria. 1. Nested Queries ElasticSearch Example: ElasticSearch supports nested documents, which allows for querying on nested fields with complex conditions. Query: Find products where the product has a review with a rating of 5 and the review text contains "excellent". { "query": { "nested": { "path": "reviews", "query": { "bool": { "must": [ { "match": { "reviews.rating": 5 } }, { "match": { "reviews.text": "excellent" } } ] } } } } } Redis Limitation: Redis does not support nested documents natively. While you can store nested structures in JSON documents using the RedisJSON module, querying these nested structures with complex condi...
Post a Comment
Read more

How are vector databases used?

  Vector Databases Usage: Typically used for vector search use cases such as visual, semantic, and multimodal search. More recently, they are paired with generative AI text models for conversational search experiences. Development Process: Begins with building an embedding model designed to encode a corpus (e.g., product images) into vectors. The data import process is referred to as data hydration. Application Development: Application developers utilize the database to search for similar products. This involves encoding a product image and using the vector to query for similar images. k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) Indexes: Within the model, k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) indexes facilitate efficient retrieval of vectors. A distance function like cosine is applied to rank results by similarity.
Post a Comment
Read more

Feature Engineering - What and Why

Feature engineering is a crucial step in the machine learning pipeline where you create new, meaningful features or transform existing features to improve the performance of your predictive models. It involves selecting, modifying, or creating features from your raw data to make it more suitable for machine learning algorithms. Here's a more detailed overview of feature engineering: Why Feature Engineering? Feature engineering is essential for several reasons: Improving Model Performance: Well-engineered features can significantly boost the predictive power of your machine learning models. Handling Raw Data: Raw data often contains noise, missing values, and irrelevant information. Feature engineering helps in cleaning and preparing the data for analysis. Capturing Domain Knowledge: Domain-specific insights can be incorporated into feature creation to make the model more representative of the problem. Common Techniques and Strategies: 1. Feature Extraction: Transforming raw data...
Post a Comment
Read more