{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreic4indaot6r3ocu63bryyb5x6wi6gig6j4h3swbyr4y6uinptrr6m",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:5sgu76a53rz3n6unbykmovqy/app.bsky.feed.post/3mlodghtoeqi2"
  },
  "description": "A vector database is a storage system optimised for similarity search over high-dimensional vectors, typically embeddings. Given a query vector, it returns the closest vectors in the corpus using an approximate nearest-neighbour index, alongside any associated metadata.\n\n\nHow it works\n\nVector databases index embeddings using approximate nearest-neighbour (ANN) algorithms such as HNSW, IVF, ScaNN, or DiskANN. These trade a small amount of recall for orders-of-magnitude better latency than a brute",
  "path": "/engineering-glossary/vector-database-similarity-search/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-12T17:39:32.000Z",
  "site": "https://sahilkapoor.com",
  "tags": [
    "Embeddings",
    "Redis",
    "pgvector",
    "PostgreSQL"
  ],
  "textContent": "**A vector database** is a storage system optimised for similarity search over high-dimensional vectors, typically embeddings. Given a query vector, it returns the closest vectors in the corpus using an approximate nearest-neighbour index, alongside any associated metadata.\n\n## How it works\n\nVector databases index embeddings using approximate nearest-neighbour (ANN) algorithms such as HNSW, IVF, ScaNN, or DiskANN. These trade a small amount of recall for orders-of-magnitude better latency than a brute-force scan. Most also support hybrid search, combining vector similarity with traditional keyword filters or BM25 scoring.\n\n## Common products\n\n  * **Managed:** Pinecone, Weaviate Cloud, Qdrant Cloud, Vespa Cloud, Turbopuffer\n  * **Self-hosted:** Weaviate, Qdrant, Milvus, Vespa, Marqo\n  * **Embedded:** Chroma, LanceDB, FAISS (library, not a database)\n  * **Relational extensions:** pgvector (PostgreSQL), MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, Redis Vector Search, Elasticsearch dense_vector\n\n\n\n🔗\n\n**Related Terms**\nEmbeddings, Redis, pgvector, PostgreSQL.",
  "title": "Vector Database",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-13T19:15:22.536Z"
}