Vector database showroom. Part 1 pgvector — The Station Wagon Already in Your Garage.

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 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).