Decoder. plain-English AI glossary

Weaviate

● Core

Open-source vector database, self-hosted or managed cloud; for storing and retrieving embeddings and structured data.

Think of it like

Vector DB you can self-host; more control, more ops work.

Example

Deploy Weaviate in Kubernetes; store document embeddings and metadata; query with Hybrid search (semantic + keyword).

How it actually works

Weaviate supports hybrid search (combining vector and keyword matching), multimodal embeddings, and GraphQL queries. Open-source (BSL license); cloud version available.

For product teams

Open-source means community momentum; monetization through managed cloud.

For engineers

Self-hostable but cloud-managed version available. More flexible than Pinecone, more ops.

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