Milvus - An open-source vector database for embedding similarity search and AI applications

Milvus is an open-source vector database built to power embedding similarity search and AI applications. Milvus makes unstructured data search more accessible, and provides a consistent user experience regardless of the deployment environment. Milvus 2.0 is a cloud-native vector database with storage and computation separated by design. All components in this refactored version of Milvus are stateless to enhance elasticity and flexibility.

As the Internet grew and evolved, unstructured data became more and more common, including emails, papers, IoT sensor data, Facebook photos, protein structures, and much more. In order for computers to understand and process unstructured data, these are converted into vectors using embedding techniques. Milvus stores and indexes these vectors. Milvus is able to analyze the correlation between two vectors by calculating their similarity distance. If the two embedding vectors are very similar, it means that the original data sources are similar as well.
 
Millvus is capable of indexing vectors on a trillion scale. Unlike existing relational databases which mainly deal with structured data following a pre-defined pattern, Milvus is designed from the bottom-up to handle embedding vectors converted from unstructured data.