Okuzeka
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning vocabulary · Prompts and Retrieval

Vector database

Meaning in artificial intelligence & machine learning, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In artificial intelligence & machine learning, vector database means: A database designed to store embeddings and quickly find the ones most similar to a query, which makes it a common part of semantic search and RAG systems.

In Turkish: vektör veritabanı

How it is used

You index documents, upsert vectors and run similarity or nearest-neighbor searches. Some teams use a dedicated vector database; others add vector search to a database they already have. Also called a vector store.

Example sentences

  1. All 200,000 help articles are chunked, embedded and stored in the vector database.

  2. Do we really need a separate vector database, or can our existing database handle it?

Common collocations

  • similarity search
  • vector store
  • nearest-neighbor search
  • index documents
  • embeddingA list of numbers (a vector) that represents a word, sentence, image or other item in such a way that items with similar meanings end up close to each other.
  • RAGShort for retrieval-augmented generation: a method in which a system first searches a document collection for relevant passages and then gives them to an LLM to write the answer.
  • LLMShort for large language model: a very large neural network trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it answer questions, write, summarize and code.
  • endpointA URL where a deployed model can be reached over a network: other software sends a request to it and receives the model's prediction or answer.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Prompts and Retrieval

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level: