Alibaba lightweight in-process vector database
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README.md

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alibaba%2Fzvec | Trendshift

🚀 Quickstart | 🏠 Home | 📚 Docs | 📊 Benchmarks | 🔎 DeepWiki | 🎮 Discord | 🐦 X (Twitter)

Zvec is an open-source, in-process vector database — lightweight, lightning-fast, and designed to embed directly into applications. Battle-tested within Alibaba Group, it delivers production-grade, low-latency and scalable similarity search with minimal setup.

[!Important] 🚀 v0.6.0 (July 20, 2026)

  • Group-By Search: Retrieve top-K results per group instead of globally (group-by deduplication) across Flat, HNSW, HNSW-RaBitQ, and sparse indexes.
  • Random Rotation Quantization: Optional random rotation for INT8/INT4 quantization distributes variance evenly across dimensions, significantly boosting recall.
  • Enhanced Full-Text Search: Upgraded FTS pipeline with a Unicode UAX #29 standard tokenizer, UTF-8 / ASCII folding, and a Snowball-based stemmer supporting 34+ languages.
  • Faster & More Robust: Block-max skip speeds up FTS conjunction queries by 2238%, plus a new DiskANN C API and numerous stability fixes.

👉 Read the Release Notes | View Roadmap 📍

💫 Features

  • Blazing Fast: Searches billions of vectors in milliseconds.
  • Simple, Just Works: Install and start searching in seconds. Pure local, no servers, no config, no fuss.
  • Dense + Sparse Vectors: Support dense and sparse embeddings, multi-vector queries, and a rich selection of vector index types that scale from memory to disk.
  • Full-Text Search (FTS): Native keyword-based full-text search — query string fields with natural-language or structured expressions.
  • Hybrid Search: Fuse vector similarity, full-text search, and structured filters in a single query for precise results.
  • Durable Storage: Write-ahead logging (WAL) guarantees persistence — data is never lost, even on process crash or power failure.
  • Concurrent Access: Multiple processes can read the same collection simultaneously; writes are single-process exclusive.
  • Runs Anywhere: As an in-process library, Zvec runs wherever your code runs — notebooks, servers, CLI tools, or even edge devices.

📦 Installation

Zvec offers official SDKs across multiple languages:

  • Python: pip install zvec (requires 64-bit Python 3.103.14)
  • Node.js: npm install @zvec/zvec
  • Go: High-performance Go bindings.
  • Rust: cargo add zvec-rust
  • Dart/Flutter: flutter pub add zvec

Prefer a visual tool? Try Zvec Studio to browse data and debug queries — no code required.

Supported Platforms

  • Linux (x86_64, ARM64)
  • macOS (ARM64)
  • Windows (x86_64)

🛠️ Building from Source

If you prefer to build Zvec from source, please check the Building from Source guide.

One-Minute Example

import zvec

# Define collection schema
schema = zvec.CollectionSchema(
    name="example",
    vectors=zvec.VectorSchema("embedding", zvec.DataType.VECTOR_FP32, 4),
)

# Create collection
collection = zvec.create_and_open(path="./zvec_example", schema=schema)

# Insert documents
collection.insert([
    zvec.Doc(id="doc_1", vectors={"embedding": [0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4]}),
    zvec.Doc(id="doc_2", vectors={"embedding": [0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.1]}),
])

# Search by vector similarity
results = collection.query(
    zvec.Query(field_name="embedding", vector=[0.4, 0.3, 0.3, 0.1]),
    topk=10
)

# Results: list of {'id': str, 'score': float, ...}, sorted by relevance
print(results)

📈 Performance at Scale

Zvec delivers exceptional speed and efficiency, making it ideal for demanding production workloads.

Zvec Performance Benchmarks

For detailed benchmark methodology, configurations, and complete results, please see our Benchmarks documentation.

🤝 Join Our Community

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❤️ Contributing

We welcome and appreciate contributions from the community! Whether you're fixing a bug, adding a feature, or improving documentation, your help makes Zvec better for everyone.

Check out our Contributing Guide to get started!