Vector database
A system optimized to store embeddings and retrieve nearby vectors.
What Vector database does not show
It finds mathematical similarity, not necessarily factual relevance, authority, permission, or freshness.
Terms this definition uses
Related terms in Retrieval engineering
How pages become chunks, vectors and candidates inside an answer engine, and why being retrieved is not being cited.
Corpus · Document ingestion · Data connector · Parsing · OCR · Layout-aware parsing · Semantic chunking · Fixed-size chunking · Chunk overlap · Parent-child retrieval · Metadata filtering · Vector index · Sparse vector · Dense vector · Cosine similarity · Dot-product similarity · Approximate nearest neighbor · HNSW · Top-k · Retrieval recall · Retrieval precision · Mean reciprocal rank · Normalized discounted cumulative gain · Relevance score · Candidate generation · Query rewriting · Query expansion · HyDE · Multi-query retrieval · Reciprocal rank fusion · Late interaction · Lexical retrieval · Semantic search · Exact-match retrieval · Freshness boosting · Authority weighting · Source diversity · Deduplication · Near-duplicate detection · Semantic cache · Retrieval latency · Retrieval cutoff · Citation mapping · Answer synthesis
Questions about Vector database
What is Vector database?
A system optimized to store embeddings and retrieve nearby vectors.
What does Vector database not show or guarantee?
It finds mathematical similarity, not necessarily factual relevance, authority, permission, or freshness.
Which area of the glossary does Vector database belong to?
Retrieval engineering: How pages become chunks, vectors and candidates inside an answer engine, and why being retrieved is not being cited.
← Metadata filtering · Vector index →
See it in the full glossary · 772 terms across 19 areas.
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