Part 8/14:
Traditional databases like MySQL or MongoDB are optimized for structured data; however, they fall short when managing billions of high-dimensional vectors. Vector databases are purpose-built to index, search, and retrieve vectors efficiently at scale.
Features of vector databases include:
Fast approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search algorithms such as Facebook’s FAISS, Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW), and product quantization.
Scalability through distributed storage and processing.
Security, reliability, and high availability for enterprise use.
Support for multiple similarity measures like cosine similarity and Euclidean distance.