Databases that store embeddings and find the nearest ones fast, the retrieval layer under RAG and semantic search. Named by Johnson, Douze and Jegou, Facebook AI Research: Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs (FAISS) (Feb 28, 2017). Also called Vector search, Vector store, Embeddings database, pgvector.
Index 0 to 100, monthly
Signals
Signal
Value
Reads as
Hacker News stories, last 12 months202 stories, +17% on the 12 months before
202 stories, +17% on the 12 months before
Adoption
arXiv papers, last 12 months362 papers, +61% on the 12 months before
milvus-io/milvusMilvus is a high-performance, cloud-native vector database built for scalable vector ANN search · Sep 16, 2019 7y7 years ago
Sep 16, 20197y7 years ago
46,248
qdrant/qdrantQdrant - High-performance, massive-scale Vector Database and Vector Search Engine for the next generation of AI. Also available in the cloud · May 30, 2020 6y6 years ago
May 30, 20206y6 years ago
34,798
weaviate/weaviateWeaviate is an open-source vector database that stores both objects and vectors, allowing for the combination of vector search with structur · Mar 30, 2016 10y10 years ago
Mar 30, 201610y10 years ago
16,842
alibaba/zvecA lightweight, lightning-fast, in-process vector database · Dec 5, 2025 9mo9 months ago
Dec 5, 20259mo9 months ago
16,002
rocketride-org/rocketride-serverHigh-performance AI pipeline engine with a C++ core and 50+ Python-extensible nodes. Build, debug, and scale LLM workflows with 13+ model pr · Feb 11, 2026 7mo7 months ago
Feb 11, 20267mo7 months ago
11,048
objectbox/objectbox-javaDatabase for Android and JVM - first and fast, lightweight on-device vector database · Jan 24, 2017 9y9 years ago
Jan 24, 20179y9 years ago
4,624
Related movements
Movement
Stage
RAGRetrieval-augmented generation: a model answers from documents fetched for the question instead of from memory alone.
Plateau
AI searchSearch that answers with a written summary and citations instead of ten blue links, and the deep research agents that followed.
Peak
History
Date
What changed
Sep 24, 2026
Tracking started: emerged February 2017, peak, 4 other names recorded
Sources: Curve: Hacker News story titles, Wikipedia pageviews and arXiv papers by month, refreshed Sep 24, 2026. Related entities from the fru.dev sites' public APIs, matched by name. How stages work.
Trending terms by email
Monday mornings: the week's top trending terms in data, tech and AI.
AWS