Milvus (vector database)
open-source distributed vector database
Milvus is a distributed vector database developed by Zilliz. It is available as both open-source software and a cloud service called Zilliz Cloud.
Milvus is an open-source project under the LF AI & Data Foundation and is distributed under the Apache License 2.0.
History
Milvus has been developed by Zilliz since 2017.
Milvus joined Linux Foundation as an incubation project in January 2020 and became a graduate in June 2021. The details about its architecture and possible applications were presented at ACM SIGMOD Conference in 2021.
Milvus 2.0, a major redesign of the whole product with a new architecture, was released in January 2022.
Milvus 3.0, which introduces elements of data lake / data warehouse based data processing, was released in July 2026.
Features
Similarity search
Various similarity search-related features are available in Milvus:
In-memory, on-disk and GPU indices,
Single query, batch query and range query search,
Support of sparse vectors, binary vectors, JSON and arrays,
FP32, FP16 and BF16 data types,
Euclidean distance, inner product distance and cosine distance support for floating-point data,
Hamming distance and jaccard distance for binary data,
Support of graph indices (including HNSW), Inverted-lists based indices and a brute-force search.
Support of vector quantization for lossy input data compression, including product quantization (PQ) and scalar quantization (SQ), that trades stored data size for accuracy,
Re-ranking.
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This entry incorporates text from “Milvus (vector database)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.