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.