What Is Vector Database?

Vector Database — a database designed to store and search high-dimensional vector embeddings by similarity, enabling fast retrieval of the items most semantically related to a query.

Vector databases are the retrieval engine behind retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): they find the most relevant documents to ground a model's answer. From a governance view they are a new place sensitive data lives, so access control, retention, and the ability to delete or correct stored embeddings matter for privacy and security.

Source: Machine-learning literature