# About AnnDB

AnnDB is a distributed approximate nearest neighbours database that allows you to provide a next-generation search experience in just a few lines of code. It's also fully hosted so there is no hassle with deploying and managing your infrastructure.

## **Key Features of AnnDB**

* **Fast:** Map-Reduce like search allows us to achieve low latency and high throughput.
* **Highly available:** AnnDB shards and replicates the data across multiple servers to ensure high availability and data resiliency.
* **CRUD:** Unlike most solutions, AnnDB does not need to rebuild the index when the data changes and makes new/updated data available almost instantly.
* **Managed:** Our software-as-a-service offering provides a managed solution for visual search, semantic search, question answering, and approximate nearest neighbours search in high-dimensional vector spaces with billions of items.

## Key Concepts

#### Vector Embeddings

Vector embeddings are abstract numeric representations of images, natural language, etc. They are often generated using deep learning models that are trained to capture visual similarity between images, semantic similarity between sentences, or question-answer relevance of facts and natural language questions.

#### Similarity Search

Unlike traditional search methods which use exact matching, inverted indices, etc., AnnDB leverages properties of vector representations to index and search items. This allows it to quickly find relevant items with high accuracy.

## Datasets

You can currently create datasets that support the following use-cases out-of-the-box:

* [Image-Image similarity](https://docs.anndb.com/datasets/images)
* [Text-Image similarity](https://docs.anndb.com/datasets/images)
* [Text semantic similarity](https://docs.anndb.com/datasets/semantic-search)
* [Question answering](https://docs.anndb.com/datasets/question-answering)
* [Vector approximate nearest neighbours](https://docs.anndb.com/datasets/vector)

AnnDB handles the embedding of images and strings to vectors internally, so that you do not have to deploy any machine learning models yourself. If you want to use your own embeddings, you can choose vector dataset type and use AnnDB as a hosted approximate nearest neighbours index.


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```
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```

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Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.