What Is a Vector Database?

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A vector database is a purpose-built database that efficiently manages stores and updates vectors at scale. Vectors, you could call them a sort of compressed data representation that contains semantic information about any underlying entity. It could be text, images, audio, anything like that. I think the scalability is a very key factor there, and it also retrieves the most similar vectors to given query in a way that considers the semantics of the query.

There’s so much talk (and hype) these days about vector databases. We thought it would be timely and practical to have someone on the show that has been hands on with the various options and actually tried to build applications leveraging vector search. Prashanth Rao is a real practitioner that has spent and huge amount of time exploring the expanding set of vector database offerings. After introducing vector database and giving us a mental model of how they fit in with other datastores, Prashanth digs into the trade offs as related to indices, hosting options, embedding vs. query optimization, and more.

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