What are vector databases?

Vector databases are specialized databases designed to store, manage, and search high-dimensional vector data, which is commonly generated from machine learning models, such as embeddings from natural language processing or image recognition. They enable efficient similarity search operations, such as finding the most similar items to a given query vector, which is essential for applications like recommendation systems, semantic search, and AI-powered search engines. Unlike traditional databases that handle structured or unstructured data, vector databases are optimized for fast and scalable similarity searches on large datasets of vectors.