AVS glossary

It is important to become familiar with the following terms before exploring the Aerospike Vector Search (AVS) documentation.

Vector terminology

The following vector-related terms are important to understanding AVS concepts.

ANN

Approximate Nearest Neighbor search is a classification of search that attempts to get the best approximate results in a short amount of time.

Dimensions (dims)

The number of elements that make up a vector. These elements can be floats, integers, or binary digits.

HNSW

Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) is an algorithm for efficient approximate nearest neighbor search in high-dimensional spaces.

Index

A data structure or mechanism that improves the speed and efficiency of data retrieval operations within a database or other data storage systems.

Index cache

A cached version of index records held in AVS memory. For more details, see search caching.

Index metadata (Namespace)

Data captured about an index. Using AVS requires configuring an index metadata namespace in the Aerospike Database storage layer.

Index record

An individual index record traverses the HNSW index. For more details, see index records

(exact) KNN

An exact k Nearest Neighbor search, which is an exhaustive search technique that gets the best results but can take a long time to perform.

RAG

Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) is a model that combines retrieval-based and generation-based approaches to generate more accurate and informative responses by augmenting generative models with retrieved documents.

Storage layer

The Aerospike Database storage system used by AVS.

Unmerged records

Records that have not been added to an index, which can be monitored using asvec.

Vector embedding

A numerical representation of data in a high-dimensional space, capturing essential features and relationships.

Vector metadata

User-supplied data that is written in records along with vector embeddings.

Aerospike terminology

The following are Aerospike-specific terms and their relational equivalents:

Term	Relational Equivalent	Description
Namespace	Database	A logical separation of data within Aerospike. A namespace allows an administrator to define storage, availability, and consistency properties for the data within it.
Set	Table	An organizational separation of data within Aerospike. A set allows an administrator to monitor usage of data within it.
(Vector) bin/field	Column	The field from which you want to create your index.
(Vector) record	Row	All the data associated with a vector. This includes the vector itself, any metadata associated with the record, and a primary key for retrieving the record.