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Speaker:

Heikki Linnakangas

Heikki Linnakangas

PostgreSQL hacker & committer, co-founder of Neon

Heikki is a cofounder of Neon and a long-time PostgreSQL developer and committer. Since 2023, he has also been contributing to pgvector.


POSETTE 2024 Talk

Vector data in Postgres - how's it different from “normal” data?

(Livestream 2)

AI works with vectors. But what is a vector? How is a vector in Postgres different from integers, text, geospatial data, or other traditional Postgres datatypes? Why can't you create a regular B-tree index over vectors? Ok, but why not a GiST index?

I will touch on these Postgres and pgvector topics:

  • pgvector extension's data types, including the new sparse and bit vector types
  • Curse of dimensionality with vector databases
  • Vector search algorithms, including HNSW (hierarchical navigable small worlds)

View the slides


Podcast Appearances

How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas

The Postgres team at Microsoft is proud to be the organizer of POSETTE: An Event for Postgres (formerly Citus Con).