VortexDB - A vector database built from scratch in Rust 🦀. VortexDB is designed for efficient similarity search and can be used as the backbone for AI-powered applications.

---

Architecture

VortexDB is organized as a Rust workspace with modular crates for flexibility and maintainability.

Indexers

The indexing layer provides efficient vector similarity search with pluggable index implementations. VortexDB supports Flat indexing for brute-force exact search (ideal for smaller datasets), KD-Tree for space-partitioning in low-dimensional vectors, and HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) graphs for fast approximate nearest neighbor search on large-scale datasets.

Supported distance metrics include Euclidean, Manhattan, Hamming, and Cosine similarity.

Storage Engine

The storage layer abstracts persistence with a StorageEngine trait, allowing different backends. RocksDB offers persistent, production-ready storage for real-world deployments.

Clients

HTTP Server

RESTful API server built with Axum:

GET  /           - Root endpoint
GET  /health     - Health check
POST /points     - Insert a point
GET  /points/:id - Get a point by ID
DELETE /points/:id - Delete a point
POST /points/search - Search for similar vectors

gRPC Server

High-performance gRPC server with Protocol Buffers. Features include:

• Configurable logging
• Full CRUD operations for vector points

TUI Client

Interactive terminal user interface built with Ratatui:

• Dashboard view for database overview
• Database management
• Vector operations (insert, search, delete)
• Modal dialogs for user input

Unified Server Startup

VortexDB offers a Dockerfile and a docker-compose for starting up the gRPC and HTTP servers
Steps to get the unified server running:

cp .env.example .env

The following env vars are important, and are required to be set by the user:
GRPC_ROOT_PASSWORD
DIMENSION
DATA_PATH

NOTE: DATA_PATH is the directory within the container where persistent data is stored

Setting of the following env vars is optional, as they fallback to safe defaults, but recommended:

.env Var	Function	Safe Default
HTTP_HOST	Host IP for the HTTP Server	0.0.0.0
HTTP_PORT	Port for the HTTP Server	3000
GRPC_HOST	Host IP for the gRPC Server	0.0.0.0
GRPC_PORT	Port for the gRPC Server	50051
STORAGE_TYPE	Store inmemory | rocksdb	inmemory
INDEX_TYPE	Type of Indexer: flat | kdtree | hnsw	flat
LOGGING	Enable logs	true
DISABLE_HTTP	Bool flag to run the HTTP Server	false

NOTE: CLI flags (e.g. docker compose run --env ) take precedence over docker-compose environment values, which in turn override .env file variables.

Now you're all set up.

To run the unified server:

docker compose up

To build the image again and run the unified server (recommended after code changes):

docker compose up --build

To run only the gRPC server (HTTP server disabled):

DISABLE_HTTP=true docker compose up

Roadmap

• InMemory implementation of StorageEngine
• Snapshots for indexers
• Benchmarking suite
• Python SDK
• JavaScript/TypeScript SDK
• Modular vectorization service

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 - see the LICENSE file for details.