PlanetScale vectors is now GA

This post announces the General Availability (GA) of PlanetScale's vector search and storage capabilities for MySQL. It details improvements made since the public beta, including doubled query performance and an eightfold increase in memory efficiency. The core contribution is the integration of vectors as a first-class relational index within MySQL, supporting standard SQL operations, transactions, and all existing PlanetScale features like branching and backups. It highlights advanced index features such as support for Euclidean, inner product, and cosine distances, up to 16,383 dimensions, and fixed/product quantization. A significant technical advancement is the incorporation of SPANN (Space-Partitioned Approximate Nearest Neighbors) into an RDBMS, enabling indexes larger than RAM by using a hybrid approach that stores vectors in hidden InnoDB tables and a portion in memory for efficient partition identification. The post also provides instructions on how to enable vector support and links to further resources.