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MariaDB 11.8 LTS Lands with Vector Search and Extended Timestamp Support
Quoting: MariaDB 11.8 LTS Lands with Vector Search and Extended Timestamp Support —
MariaDB Foundation published its annual long-term support release of its highly popular open-source RDBMS, MariaDB 11.8 LTS. The main highlight is MariaDB Vector, a native implementation of vector similarity search – a key technique in machine learning and natural language processing.
The release introduces a dedicated VECTOR data type, index structures optimized for nearest-neighbor queries, and helper functions such as VEC_DISTANCE() for Euclidean or cosine calculations.
Under the hood, SIMD optimizations leverage AVX2, AVX-512, ARM NEON, and IBM Power10 instructions, allowing large-scale retrieval-augmented generation and other AI workloads to run directly inside the database engine. For organizations exploring generative AI, that’s a big deal: you can keep embeddings and business data in one place while still hitting low-latency retrieval targets.