Welcome to the Vector Database Showroom — a guided tour through today's most popular vector databases, where we look pas...

Welcome to the Vector Database Showroom — a guided tour through today's most popular vector databases, where we look past the marketing brochures and judge each one by its real cost of ownership. Up first: pgvector, the quiet contender that's probably already sitting in your garage. 🚙 pgvector — The Station Wagon Already in Your Garagepgvector isn't a separate database. It's a Postgres extension: one CREATE EXTENSION later, your vectors live next to your regular data.Under the hood: the vector type, two index types (HNSW, IVFFlat), three core distance metrics (L2, cosine, inner product). Since v0.6: halfvec (half the memory) and sparse vectors. Since v0.7: iterative index scans for filtered search. Where it shines:ACID transactions: the embedding and its metadata commit atomically. No dual-write sync, no "eventually consistent" surprisesJoins: "find similar documents AND fetch related rows" without an application-level roundtripBackups, monitoring, access control, read replicas — every...