← Back to Glossary
Vector Database
A database engine specifically optimized to store embeddings and perform fast similarity searches.
Why it exists
Traditional SQL databases index exact strings, not multi-dimensional mathematical vectors. Vector DBs enable sub-second vector similarity lookup.
How it works
Uses specialized index structures like HNSW to find nearest neighbor vectors in milliseconds across millions of items (e.g. Pinecone, Chroma, Qdrant).