What is a Vector Database?
A Vector Database is a type of database that is designed to handle data represented by vectors or multi-dimensional points. These databases use methods that allow search, storage, and manipulation of vectors, permitting tasks like proximity searches, similarity searches, and performing operations based on the vector's tuples. These vectors often represent complex data forms such as images, documents, or even sound files, which are essential to machine learning, AI development, multimedia storage, and analysis.
How does a Vector Database technology work?
Vector Databases convert data points into numerical vectors and then store them in a space where they can be efficiently queried based on their relative distance or similarity. These databases use specific indexing algorithms, such as Annoy (Approximate Nearest Neighbors Oh Yeah), which builds a forest of trees to partition the vector space for faster querying. By doing so, they can conduct operations on data items in large datasets, encompassing tasks from identifying related items to classification tasks. Vectors databases can efficiently search similarities even in high dimensional vector spaces.
Read our blog about utilizing PubNub Functions to create a Vector Database.
Use Cases of Vector Databases:
AI and Machine Learning: AI models often require handling complex data forms such as images and natural language texts, which are conveniently represented as vectors. A vector database aids in the effective storage and querying of these data.
Multimedia Content Management: In modern digital media platforms, vector databases help in image and video search by converting the content into vectors and matching them for similarity.
Bioinformatics: Vector databases are instrumental in dealing with genomic and proteomic data, where sequences can be represented and analyzed as complex vectors.
Sentiment Analysis: In the realm of natural language processing, vector databases aid in understanding the sentiment behind a body of text by representing words, phrases, or entire documents as vectors.
Recommendation Systems: Vector databases help personalize suggestions in online shopping, streaming services, etc., by comparing user profile vectors with product vectors to find matches that align with a user's interests and behaviour patterns.
Related Material
Build a LLM Chatbot with a Custom Knowledge Base: Learn how to create your own Custom Knowledge Base using PubNub Functions and Vectara. Build a Chatbot with PubNub and ChatGPT / OpenAI: Utilize PubNub Functions to build a quick OpenAI ChatBot with PubNub.
