Milvus is a cloud-native vector database for organizing and searching unstructured data at scale. It supports vector ANN search, hybrid search with metadata filtering, and streaming updates for AI applications.
Project overview
Milvus is a cloud-native vector database for organizing and searching unstructured data at scale. It supports vector ANN search, hybrid search with metadata filtering, and streaming updates for AI applications.
Project type
RAG · AI Search · Vector Database
Use cases
Knowledge Q&A · Search & Research
Deployment
Docker / Docker Compose
License
Apache-2.0
Best for
Developers, data teams, and AI engineers who need to perform scalable vector ANN search, range search, or hybrid search with metadata filtering on billions of vectors.
Key capabilities
Executes efficient vector ANN search, range search, and hybrid search with metadata filtering.
Natively supports full text search with BM25 and learned sparse embeddings (SPLADE, BGE-M3) alongside dense vectors.
Ensures data security via mandatory user authentication, TLS encryption, and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).
Implements hardware acceleration for CPU/GPU to achieve high vector search performance.
Python SDK to interact with Milvus for creating collections, ingesting data, and performing searches.
Limitations and risks
Building from source requires specific toolchain versions and OS constraints.
Getting started
Setup is listed as easy because Milvus Lite supports pip install for a quick start. Users can install PyMilvus via 'pip install -U pymilvus', instantiate MilvusClient, and call create_collection to begin. Coding is required.
Evidence and sources
GitHub project description: Milvus is a high-performance, cloud-native vector database built for scalable vector ANN search
README: The Milvus open-source project is under LF AI & Data Foundation, distributed with Apache 2.0 License, with Zilliz as its major contributor.
README: Milvus is a high-performance vector database built for scale. It powers AI applications by efficiently organizing and searching vast amounts of unstructured data, such as text, im…
README: It stores vectors, which are learned representations of unstructured data, together with other scalar data types such as integers, strings, and JSON objects. Users can conduct eff…
README: Milvus integrates with a comprehensive suite of AI development tools, such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI and HuggingFace, making it an ideal vector store for GenAI applications…