In the rapidly evolving technological landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a driving force behind innovation and efficiency. However, to harness its full potential, enterprises need suitable data infrastructures that can support AI workloads effectively. 

This blog explores how intelligent data infrastructure, combined with open source technologies, is revolutionizing AI applications across various business functions. It outlines the benefits of leveraging existing infrastructure and highlights key open source databases that are indispensable for powering AI. 

The Power of Open Source in AI Solutions 

Open source technologies have long been celebrated for their flexibility, community support, and cost-efficiency. In the realm of AI these advantages are magnified. Here’s why open source is indispensable for AI-fueled solutions: 

1. Cost Efficiency: Open source solutions eliminate licensing fees, making them an attractive option for businesses looking to optimize their budgets.
2. Community Support: A vibrant community of developers constantly improves these platforms, ensuring they remain cutting-edge.
3. Flexibility and Customization: Open source tools can be tailored to meet specific needs, allowing enterprises to build solutions that align perfectly with their goals. 
4. Transparency and Security: With open source, you have visibility into the code, which allows for better security audits and trustworthiness. 

Vector Databases: A Key Component for AI Workloads 

Vector databases are increasingly indispensable for AI workloads. They store data in high-dimensional vectors, which AI models use to understand patterns and relationships. This capability is crucial for applications involving natural language processing, image recognition, and recommendation systems. 

Vector databases use embedding vectors (lists of numbers) to represent data similarities and plot relationships spatially. For example, “plant” and “shrub” will have closer vector coordinates than “plant” and “car”. This allows enterprises to build their own LLMs, explore large text datasets, and enhance search capabilities. 

Vector databases and embeddings also support retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which improves LLM accuracy by refining its understanding of new information. For example, RAG can let users query documentation by creating embeddings from an enterprise’s documents, translating words into vectors, finding similar words in the documentation, and retrieving relevant information. This data is then provided to an LLM, enabling it to generate accurate text answers for users. 

The Role of Vector Databases in AI: 

1. Efficient Data Handling: Vector databases excel at handling large volumes of data efficiently, which is essential for training and deploying AI models. 
2. High Performance: They offer high-speed retrieval and processing of complex data types, ensuring AI applications run smoothly. 
3. Scalability: With the ability to scale horizontally, vector databases can grow alongside your AI initiatives without compromising performance. 

Leveraging Existing Infrastructure for AI Workloads 

Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t necessary to invest in new and exotic specialized data layer solutions. Your existing infrastructure can often support AI workloads with a few strategic enhancements: 

1. Evaluate Current Capabilities: Start by assessing your current data infrastructure to identify any gaps or areas for improvement. 
2. Upgrade Where Necessary: Consider upgrading components such as storage, network speed, and computing power to meet the demands of AI workloads. 
3. Integrate with AI Tools: Ensure your infrastructure is compatible with leading AI tools and platforms to facilitate seamless integration. 

Open Source Databases for Enterprise AI 

Several open source databases are particularly well-suited for enterprise AI applications. Let‘s look at the 3 free open source databases that enterprise teams can leverage as they scale their intelligent data infrastructure for storing those embedding vectors: 

PostgreSQL® and pgvector 

“The world’s most advanced open source relational database“, PostgreSQL is also one of the most widely deployed, meaning that most enterprises will already have a strong foothold in the technology. The pgvector extension turns Postgres into a high-performance vector store, offering a path of least resistance for organizations familiar with PostgreSQL to quickly stand-up intelligent data infrastructure. 

From a RAG and LLM training perspective, pgvector excels at enabling distance-based embedding search, exact nearest neighbor search, and approximate nearest neighbor search. pgvector efficiently captures semantic similarities using L2 distance, inner product, and (the OpenAI-recommended) cosine distance. Teams can also harness OpenAI’s embeddings model (available as an API) to calculate embeddings for documentation and user queries. As an enterprise-ready open source option, pgvector is an already-proven solution for achieving efficient, accurate, and performant LLMs, helping equip teams to confidently launch differentiated and AI-fueled applications into production.

OpenSearch® 

Because OpenSearch is a mature search and analytics engine already popular with a wide swath of enterprises, new and current users will be glad to know that the open source solution is ready to up the pace of AI application development as a singular search, analytics, and vector database.  

OpenSearch has long offered low latency, high availability, and the scale to handle tens of billions of vectors while backing stable applications. It provides great nearest-neighbor search functionality to support vector, lexical, and hybrid search and analytics. These capabilities significantly simplify the implementation of AI solutions, from generative AI  agents to recommendation engines with trustworthy results and minimal hallucinations. 

Apache Cassandra® 5.0 with Native Vector Indexing

Known for its linear scalability and fault-tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure, Apache Cassandra is a reliable choice for enterprise-grade AI applications. The newest version of the highly popular open source Apache Cassandra database introduces several new features built for AI workloads. It now includes Vector Search and Native Vector indexing capabilities.

Additionally, there is a new vector data type specifically for saving and retrieving embedding vectors, and new CQL functions for easily executing on those capabilities. By adding these features, Apache Cassandra 5.0 has emerged as an especially ideal database for intelligent data strategies and for enterprises rapidly building out AI applications across myriad use cases.

Cassandra’s earned reputation for delivering high availability and scalability now adds AI-specific functionality, making it one of the most enticing open source options for enterprises. 

Open Source Opens the Door to Successful AI Workloads 

Clearly, given the tremendously rapid pace at which AI technology is advancing, enterprises cannot afford to wait to build out differentiated AI applications. But in this pursuit, engaging with the wrong proprietary data-layer solutions—and suffering the pitfalls of vendor lock-in or simply mismatched features—can easily be (and, for some, already is) a fatal setback. Instead, tapping into one of the very capable open source vector databases available will allow enterprises to put themselves in a more advantageous position. 

When leveraging open source databases for AI workloads, consider the following: 

• Data Security: Ensure robust security measures are in place to protect sensitive data. 
• Scalability: Plan for future growth by choosing solutions that can scale with your needs. 
• Resource Allocation: Allocate sufficient resources, such as computing power and storage, to support AI applications. 
• Governance and Compliance: Adhere to governance and compliance standards to ensure responsible use of AI. 

Conclusion 

Intelligent data infrastructure and open source technologies are revolutionizing the way enterprises approach AI workloads. By leveraging existing infrastructure and integrating powerful open source databases, organizations can unlock the full potential of AI, driving innovation and efficiency. 

Ready to take your AI initiatives to the next level? Leverage a single platform to help you design, deploy and monitor the infrastructure to support the capabilities of PostgreSQL with pgvector, OpenSearch, and Apache Cassandra 5.0 today.

And for more insights and expert guidance, don’t hesitate to contact us and speak with one of our open source experts!