Many popular artificial intelligence (AI) applications are powered by vector databases, from computer vision to new drug discovery. Indexing, a process of organizing data that drastically accelerates big data search, enables us to efficiently query million, billion, or even trillion-scale vector datasets.
This article is supplementary to the previous blog, "Accelerating Similarity Search on Really Big Data with Vector Indexing," covering the role indexing plays in making vector similarity search efficient and different indexes, including FLAT, IVF_FLAT, IVF_SQ8, and IVF_SQ8H. This article also provides the performance test results of the four indexes. We recommend reading this blog first.
This article provides an overview of the four main types of indexes and continues to introduce four different indexes: IVF_PQ, HNSW, ANNOY, and E2LSH.