The Origins of Lance DB and Building a Vector Database

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This chapter discusses the origins of Lance DB and the motivation behind building a vector database. It explores the initial focus on serving companies in computer vision and the challenges faced with managing multimodal data for AI projects. It also highlights the decision to build a single source of truth for tabulated and unstructured data, leading to the development of Lance DB.

Prashanth Rao mentioned LanceDB as a stand out amongst the many vector DB options in episode #234. Now, Chang She (co-founder and CEO of LanceDB) joins us to talk through the specifics of their open source, on-disk, embedded vector search offering. We talk about how their unique columnar database structure enables serverless deployments and drastic savings (without performance hits) at scale. This one is super practical, so don’t miss it!

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