Google BigQuery Introduces Vector Search
InfoQ, Saturday, March 9th, 2024
Google recently announced that BigQuery now supports vector search. The new functionality enables vector similarity search required by data and AI use cases such as semantic search, similarity detection, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with a large language model (LLM).
In preview mode, the approximate nearest-neighbor search of the serverless data warehouse provides a VECTOR_SEARCH function and relies on an index to optimize the lookups and distance computations required to identify closely matching embeddings. BigQuery vector indexes are automatically updated and the first implemented type (IVF) combines a clustering model with an inverted row locator in a two-piece index.