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Explaining Vector Databases in 3 Levels of

Difficulty
From noob to expert: Demystifying vector databases across different backgrounds

Leonie Monigatti · Follow

Published in Towards Data Science
8 min read · Jul 4

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Vector space (Image hand-drawn by the author)

Vector databases have been getting a lot of attention recently, with many vector
database startups raising millions in funding.
Chances are you have probably already heard of them but didn’t really care about
them until now —at least, that’s what I guess why you are here now…

If you are here just for the short answer, lets jump right in:

Definition: What is a Vector Database?

A vector database is a type of database that stores and manages unstructured data,
such as text, images, or audio, in vector embeddings (high-dimensional vectors) to
make it easy to find and retrieve similar objects quickly.

If that definition only caused more confusion, then let’s go step by step. This article
is inspired by WIRED’s “5 Levels” Video Series and unpacks what vector databases
are in the following three levels of difficulty:

Explain It Like I’m 5

Explaining Vector Databases to Digital Natives and Tech Enthusiasts

Explaining Vector Databases to Engineers and Data Professionals

Vector Databases: Explain It Like I’m 5 (ELI5)

This is slightly off-topic, but do you know what I don’t understand?

When people arrange their bookshelves by color. — Yikes!

How do they find a book when they don’t know what color the book cover is?
 Photo by Luisa Brimble on Unsplash

The intuition behind vector databases

If you want to find a specific book quickly, arranging your bookshelf by genre and
then by the author makes much more sense than by color. That’s why most libraries
are organized in this way to help you find what you’re looking for quickly.

But how do you find something to read based on a query instead of a genre or an
author? What if you want to read a book that is, for example:

similar to “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” or

about a main character that likes eating as much as you do?

If you don’t have the time to browse the bookshelves, the fastest way to go about this
would be to ask the librarian for their recommendation because they have read a lot
of the books and will know exactly which one fits your query best.

In the example of organizing books, you can think of the librarian as a vector
database because vector databases are designed to store complex information (e.g.,
the plot of a book) about an object (e.g., a book). Thus, vector databases can help you
find objects based on a specific query (e.g., a book that is about…) rather than a few
pre-defined attributes (e.g., author) — just like a librarian.

Explaining Vector Databases to Digital Natives and Tech Enthusiasts

Now, let’s stick to the library example and get a little bit more technical: Of course,
these days, there are more advanced techniques to search for a book in a library
than only by genre or author.

If you visit a library, there’s usually a computer in the corner that helps you find a
book with some more specific attributes, like title, ISBN, year of publication, or
some keywords. Based on the values you enter, a database of the available books is
then queried. This database is usually a traditional relational database.

What is the difference between a relational database and a vector database?

The main difference between relational databases and vector databases lies in the
type of data they store. While relational databases are designed for structured data
that fits into tables, vector databases are intended for unstructured data, such as
text or images.

The type of data that is stored also influences how the data is retrieved: In relational
databases, query results are based on matches for specific keywords. In vector
databases, query results are based on similarity.

You can think of traditional relational databases like spreadsheets. They are great
for storing structural data, such as base information about a book (e.g., title, author,
ISBN, etc.), because this type of information can be stored in columns, which are
great for filtering and sorting.

With relational databases, you can quickly get all the books that are, e.g., children’s
books, and have “caterpillar” in the title.

But what if you liked that “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” was about food? You could
try to search for the keyword “food”, but unless the keyword “food” is mentioned in
the book's summary, you aren’t even going to find “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”.
Instead, you will probably end up with a bunch of cookbooks and disappointment.

And this is one limitation of relational databases: You must add all the information
you think someone might need to find that specific item. But how do you know
which information and how much of it to add? Adding all this information is time-
consuming and does not guarantee completeness.

Now this is where vector databases come into play!

But first, a little detour on a concept called vector embeddings.

Today’s Machine Learning (ML) algorithms can convert a given object (e.g., word or
text) into a numerical representation that preserves the information of that object.
Imagine you give an ML model a word (e.g., “food”), then that ML model does its
magic and returns you a long list of numbers. This long list of numbers is the
numerical representation of your word and is called vector embedding.

Because these embeddings are a long list of numbers, we call them high-
dimensional. Let’s pretend for a second that these embeddings are only three-
dimensional to visualize them as shown below.
You can see that similar words like “hungry”, “thirsty”, “food”, and “drink” are all
grouped in a similar corner, while other words like “bicycle” and “car” are close
together but in a different corner in this vector space.

The numerical representations enable us to apply mathematical calculations to

objects, such as words, which are usually not suited for calculations. For example,
the following calculation will not work unless you replace the words with their
embeddings:

drink - food + hungry = thirsty

And because we are able to use the embeddings for calculations, we can also
calculate the distances between a pair of embedded objects. The closer two
embedded objects are to one another, the more similar they are.

As you can see, vector embeddings are pretty cool.

Let’s go back to our example and say we embed the content of every book in the
library and store these embeddings in a vector database. Now, when you want to
find a “children’s book with a main character that likes food”, your query is also
embedded, and the books that are most similar to your query are returned, such as
“The Very Hungry Caterpillar” or maybe “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”.
What are the use cases of vector databases?
Vector databases have been around before the hype around Large Language Models
(LLMs) started. Originally, they were used in recommendation systems because they
can quickly find similar objects for a given query. But because they can provide
long-term memory to LLMs, they have also been used in question-answering
applications recently.

Explaining Vector Databases to Engineers and Data Professionals

If you could already guess that vector databases are probably a way to store vector
embeddings before opening this article and just want to know what vector
embeddings are under the hood, then let’s get into the nitty-gritty and talk about
algorithms.
How do vector databases work?
Vector databases are able to retrieve similar objects of a query quickly because they
have already pre-calculated them. The underlying concept is called Approximate
Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search, which uses different algorithms for indexing and
calculating similarities.

As you can imagine, calculating the similarities between a query and every
embedded object you have with a simple k-nearest neighbors (kNN) algorithm can
become time-consuming when you have millions of embeddings. With ANN, you
can trade in some accuracy in exchange for speed and retrieve the approximately
most similar objects to a query.

Indexing — For this, a vector database indexes the vector embeddings. This step
maps the vectors to a data structure that will enable faster searching.

You can think of indexing as grouping the books in a library into different
categories, such as author or genre. But because embeddings can hold more
complex information, further categories could be “gender of the main character” or
“main location of plot”. Indexing can thus help you retrieve a smaller portion of all
the available vectors and thus speeds up retrieval.
We will not go into the technical details of indexing algorithms, but if you are
interested in further reading, you might want to start by looking up Hierarchical
Navigable Small World (HNSW).

Similarity Measures — To find the nearest neighbors to the query from the indexed
vectors, a vector database applies a similarity measure. Common similarity
measures include cosine similarity, dot product, Euclidean distance, Manhattan
distance, and Hamming distance.
What is the advantage of vector databases over storing the vector embeddings in a NumPy
array?
A question I have come across often (already) is: Can’t we just use NumPy arrays to
store the embeddings? — Of course, you can if you don’t have many embeddings or
if you are just working on a fun hobby project. But as you can already guess, vector
databases are noticeably faster when you have a lot of embeddings, and you don’t
have to hold everything in memory.

I’ll keep this short because Ethan Rosenthal has done a much better job explaining the
difference between using a vector database vs. using a NumPy array than I could ever
write.

Do you actually need a vector database? | Ethan Rosenthal

Spoiler alert: the answer is maybe! Although, my inclusion of the
word “actually” betrays my bias. Vector databases are…
www.ethanrosenthal.com

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Written by Leonie Monigatti

12.7K Followers · Writer for Towards Data Science

Developer Advocate @ Weaviate. Follow for practical data science guides - whether you're a data scientist or
not. linkedin.com/in/804250ab

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