Will Amazon S3 Vectors kill vector databases or save them?

Postgres has pgvector. Postgres is where all of my data already lives. It’s all open source and runs anywhere. What am I missing with the specialty vector stores?

latency, actual retrieval performance, integrated pipelines that do more than just vector search to produce better results, the list goes on.

Postgres for vector search is fine for toy products or stuff that's outside the hot loop of your business but for high performance applications it's just inadequate.

For the vast majority of applications, the trade off is worth keeping everything in Postgres vs operational overhead of some VC hype data store that won’t be around in 5 years. Most people learned this lesson with Mongo (postgrest jsonb is now good enough for 90% of scenarios).

I'm a legit postgres fanboy, my comment history will back this up, but the ops overhead and performance implications of trying to run PGvector as your core vector store for everything is just silly, you're going to be doing all sorts of postgres replication gymnastics to make up for the fact that you're using the wrong tool for the job. It's good for prototyping and small/non-core workloads, use it outside that scope at your own peril.