Vector database
A database optimized for storing and quickly searching embeddings. It answers the question "which fragments are semantically similar to this query?" in milliseconds, even across millions of documents. The "long-term memory" component of a RAG system.
- Appeared
- A category that consolidated in 2022–2023 (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, Qdrant).
- Tactics
- We choose the solution by volume and hosting requirements; for EU/on-premise deployments we use self-hosted options, [GDPR](#gdpr)-compliant.
Related terms
“Vector database” is part of Glossary · AI Chatbot — part of the Atlas, Websem's reference of AI search, marketing and data terms.