MyVector Magic: Elevating MySQL with AI Search

Oracle Ace Alkin Tezuysal joins leFred and Scott to introduce the MyVector plugin for MySQL Community Edition, bringing powerful vector search capabilities to your favorite open-source database. Learn how MyVector enables advanced AI and similarity search features, why this matters for modern applications, and how the MySQL community can easily get started.

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Episode Transcript:

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Welcome to Inside MySQL: Sakila Speaks, a podcast dedicated to all things MySQL. We bring you the latest news from the MySQL team, MySQL product updates and insightful interviews with members of the MySQL community.

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Sit back and enjoy as your hosts bring you the latest updates on your favorite open source database. Let's get started.

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Hello and welcome to Sakila Speaks, the podcast dedicated to MySQL. I'm LeFred.

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And I'm Scott Stroz.

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Joining us today is Alkin Tezuysal. We know each other for a long time already and Alkin serves as Director of Services at Altinity Inc.

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Bringing over 30 years of experience in open source relational databases with deep expertise in MySQL, of course, and ClickHouse.

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He co-authored key references works including MySQL Cookbook 4th edition that came in 2022 and Database Design and Modeling with Postgres and MySQL in 2024.

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Alkin, you have been honored as MySQL Rockstar in 2023. And since this year, you are also an Oracle Ace Pro for MySQL. Congratulations and welcome to Inside MySQL: Sakila Speaks.

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Thank you very much, everyone.

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We're glad you're here. Alkin, as you may not know, this season of the podcast is dedicated to all things AI as it relates to MySQL and HeatWave.

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And you actually created or wrote a plugin for MySQL Community that kind of helped with that, MyVector.

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Can you give us an overview of what MyVector is and what problem it's meant to solve?

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Sure. Thank you very much for the question.

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And I'm very happy that this year of AI and HeatWave, everything that actually contributes to this technology because it's fairly new.

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It's been developing for many years, as we already know, but now it's in our hands.

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We can use it. We can definitely use it on our day-to-day activities, whether it's troubleshooting your dishwasher or your washing machine.

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But we could also use it in a business-wise database.

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So one correction I want to make is I am a contributor to MyVector plugin, not to author.

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The author is Shankar Iyer, and he's a developer for databases for many years.

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He's got a lot of experience where I've actually been presenting and supporting this project.

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And that's the small correction. Other than that, MyVector is a native plugin for MySQL that adds support for storing and searching high dimensional vectors.

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This is basically a very, in simple terms, what it does.

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And this has been in development for some time.

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And as we have seen other, you know, databases, other open source databases also went into this with the, you know, launching of AI to our, you know, end users.

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Adding approximate nearest neighbor n-search directly in SQL within MySQL database was kind of needed.

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And there has been similar implementations with MySQL.

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But MyVector is the open source version of that as a plugin.

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So just to wrap up that answer is MyVector column type for embedding storage.

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And there's a MyVector.

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There's a bunch of functions that MyVector distance for the similarity competition.

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Of course, it uses HNSW-based index algorithm, which is very popular.

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There's a white paper around it.

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It's not a rocket science or just something that was invented for MyVector that is known science.

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And basically, it provides an SQL native interface within MySQL.

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Hope that answers that