The AI revolution has led to the widespread adoption of applications involving large language models, generative AI, and semantic search, all of which rely heavily on vector embeddings—high-dimensional data representations carrying critical semantic information. Managing these complex embeddings can be a daunting challenge.
Enter vector databases: specialized solutions designed to deal with vector embeddings more efficiently than traditional scalar-based databases or standalone vector indices.
In this blog post, we will look at the top options for vector databases for AI models, highlighting their crucial role in handling embeddings and their cutting-edge features like semantic information retrieval, long-term memory capabilities, real-time updates, and built-in security measures.
Pinecone
Pinecone is a vector database designed for easy creation of high-performance vector search applications. As a developer-friendly, fully managed, and easily scalable solution, it eliminates infrastructure concerns.
Some of the use cases for Pinecone’s vector search capabilities include semantic search, recommendation systems, and various applications that depend on relevant information retrieval.
Pinecone offers fast, fresh, and filtered vector search. It provides ultra-low query latency, even with billions of items, ensuring a positive user experience. The live index updates as data is added, edited, or deleted, and you can combine vector search with metadata filters for more relevant and faster results.
The platform integrates with other AI tools such as Hugging Face and LangChain, allowing you to supercharge your AI stack. Pinecone is a fully managed and production-ready vector database, so you can launch, use, and scale your vector search service with an easy API without worrying about infrastructure or algorithms.
Milvus
Designed specifically for handling queries over input vectors, Milvus can index vectors on a trillion scale. Unlike traditional relational databases that handle structured data, Milvus focuses on embedding vectors converted from unstructured data.
To process unstructured data like images, video, audio, and natural language, Milvus converts them into vectors using embedding techniques. The system then stores and indexes these vectors, allowing it to analyze the correlation between two vectors by calculating their similarity distance. A high similarity between two embedding vectors signifies a similarity between the original data sources as well. Vector similarity search, which compares a vector to a database to find the most similar vectors, is a key concept in Milvus.
Milvus excels in several areas, including high performance when conducting vector search on massive datasets, a developer-first community that offers multi-language support and toolchain, cloud scalability, high reliability, and hybrid search capabilities.
Marqo
As a multi-modal vector search engine, Marqo is designed to integrate seamlessly with your applications, websites, and workflows. Its versatility as a robust search and analytics engine allows for easy integration into any project.
Marqo’s impressive speed and scalability are notable features. Regardless of the number of documents you need to search, Marqo provides quick query times. Its multi-modal capabilities enable the configuration of deep-learning models like CLIP to extract semantic meaning from images, opening up possibilities for image-to-image, image-to-text, and text-to-image search and analytics.
Marqo adapts to your data storage needs with its fluid, schemaless approach. This combination of tensor search and query DSL allows you to move beyond keyword matching and find results based on the meaning of text, images, and other unstructured data.
With Marqo, developers are a priority. The platform offers features such as text search that emphasizes semantic meaning, end-to-end image search functionality, horizontal scalability for fast search times, custom model integration from shared repositories, search highlighting, and powerful query DSL-based filtering. Whether you opt for the free open-source version or the fully-managed, serverless cloud service, Marqo can be deployed anywhere using Docker and will scale effortlessly with your needs.
LanceDB
LanceDB is an open-source database for vector-search with persistent storage. Key features include production-scale vector search without server management, optimization for multi-modal data, native Python and upcoming Javascript/Typescript support, and the ability to combine attribute-based information with vectors for a single source-of-truth. Additionally, LanceDB offers zero-copy automatic versioning, eliminating the need for extra infrastructure, and ecosystem integrations with tools like Apache-Arrow, Pandas, Polars, and DuckDB.
LanceDB’s core, written in Rust, is built using Lance, an open-source columnar format designed for efficient ML workloads. This free and open-source vector database can be run locally or on your own server, providing a fast and easy-to-embed solution for your backend server.
The creators of LanceDB aimed to address the challenges faced by ML/AI application builders when using services like Pinecone. By leveraging their experience in data/ML tooling, they’ve reimagined vector search to enhance developer productivity, scalability, and performance. Backed by the Lance format, a modern columnar data format alternative to Parquet, LanceDB is optimized for high-speed random access and management of AI datasets like vectors, documents, and images. Moreover, it allows you to store and filter other features alongside vectors, enabling users to replace multiple data stores with LanceDB and achieve faster results.
Since its initial release, the LanceDB team has been working on several updates and improvements, such as LangChain integration and a TypeScript implementation. Future plans include ecosystem integrations into OpenAI plugin/AutoGPT, a richer set of embedding functions, a gallery of generative AI apps powered by LanceDB, and solutions for cloud deployment.
pgvector
pgvector is an open-source vector similarity search extension for Postgres that supports exact and approximate nearest neighbor search, as well as L2 distance, inner product, and cosine distance calculations. It is compatible with any language that has a Postgres client and supports Postgres 11 and later.
To get started, you will need to create a vector column with the desired dimensions and insert vectors into the table. You can then perform queries such as finding the nearest neighbors by L2 distance, inner product, or cosine distance. The extension also allows you to store and update vectors, delete them, and calculate distances between vectors.
Indexing can be used to enhance the performance of your queries, with approximate nearest neighbor search offering a trade-off between recall and performance. To achieve good recall, consider creating the index after the table has some data, choosing an appropriate number of lists, and specifying an appropriate number of probes when querying. It is important to note that adding an approximate index may result in different query results compared to exact nearest neighbor search.
Summary
It goes without saying that there are going to be a lot of these types of projects popping up in the coming months. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this myself, and will keep updating this list accordingly. For the time being, Pinecone seems to offer one of the smoothest developer experiences. The free plan they offer is generous for a single project, but I think their paid plan is also worth the investment if you plan on integrating your internal data into a more broad querying environment.
