Intel improving the performance of MariaDB Vector

As you have probably seen in earlier posts, the preview version of MariaDB Vector is out and ready for you to play with. We have had input from several different places during the development of this feature. This, of course, includes hardware manufacturers such as Intel.

In the background, Intel have been prototyping using AVX512 instructions for dot product and bloom filter. Both of these are functions are part of vector searches. If you haven’t heard of these terms, let me try and break them down.

AVX-512 – 512-bit extensions to the Intel Advanced Vector Extension

The AVX512 instructions themselves are CPU specific instructions that are designed to run calculations on large vectors of numbers simultaneously.

Amazon contributes to MariaDB Vector

MariaDB Vector preview was recently released, bringing much awaited Vector Search functionality to MariaDB Server. One of the major open source contributors to MariaDB Vector has been Amazon. To share the excitement and get an inside view about what it’s like to contribute to MariaDB Server, I had a chat with software engineer Hugo Wen on the Amazon RDS team

Hugo’s contributions to MariaDB Vector

Hugo Wen’s work on vector similarity search in MariaDB and MySQL started when Amazon’s leadership identified Vector Search functionality as a critical addition and decided to invest Amazon RDS team’s time on contributing to MariaDB Vector.