Vector Databases: The Foundation of Modern AI Systems

Vector Databases: The Foundation of Modern AI Systems

Vector databases are the infrastructure layer that powers modern AI. They store and retrieve high-dimensional vectors with incredible speed, enabling semantic search and RAG systems.

What is a Vector Database?

A vector database is optimized for storing and searching vectors—high-dimensional arrays of numbers generated by embedding models.

Unlike traditional databases using exact matching, vector databases use similarity search:

Traditional Database: WHERE name = 'John' // Exact match
Vector Database: FIND vectors similar to [0.2, 0.5, 0.8, ...] // Semantic match

How They Work

Embeddings convert text to vectors:

Text: "Spring Boot microservices"
↓
Vector: [0.234, 0.891, 0.123, ..., 0.456]

Similarity metrics find related vectors:

double cosine = dotProduct(a, b) / (magnitude(a) * magnitude(b));
// Result: 0.99 (very similar) vs 0.12 (different)

Popular Vector Databases

Pinecone - Fully managed, cloud-native
Weaviate - Open source, flexible
Milvus - Open source, scalable
Qdrant - High performance
pgvector - PostgreSQL extension

Using with Spring AI

@Service
public class RAGWithVectorDB {
    private final VectorStore vectorStore;
    private final ChatClient chatClient;

    public String answerQuestion(String question) {
        // Query vector database
        List<Document> relevant = vectorStore.similaritySearch(question, 5);

        // Build context from retrieved documents
        String context = relevant.stream()
            .map(Document::getContent)
            .collect(Collectors.joining("\n"));

        // Generate answer grounded in documents
        return chatClient.prompt()
            .user(String.format("Context: %s\nQuestion: %s", context, question))
            .call()
            .content();
    }
}

Key Features

Similarity Search - Find vectors close to a query
Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) - Trade slight accuracy for massive speed
Metadata Filtering - Combine vector search with traditional filters
Scalability - Handle billions of vectors
Real-time Updates - Insert/delete without rebuilding

When to Use Vector Databases

✅ Building RAG systems
✅ Semantic search
✅ Recommendation systems
✅ AI agents with memory

❌ Exact matches (use SQL DB)
❌ Small datasets (<100K vectors)

Performance Considerations

Recall vs Speed:

Exact search: 100% recall, slow
ANN search: 95% recall, 100x faster

Embedding Dimensions:

• 384-dim: Fast, good (DistilBERT)
• 768-dim: Standard (BERT)
• 1536-dim: High quality (OpenAI)

Best Practices

1. Choose embedding model matching your needs
2. Use metadata for precise filtering
3. Implement reranking with LLM
4. Monitor latency and recall
5. Plan for scale from the start
6. Version embeddings—model updates require re-embedding

The Landscape

Conclusion

Vector databases bridge embeddings and intelligent applications. They transform dense numerical representations into actionable semantic search at scale.

Choose the right database for your requirements and integrate with Spring AI to build systems that truly understand meaning.