It sits there. A dream of the future in the center of Data Lake. It promises tomorrow, always tomorrow. Mastery of AI, access to knowledge, control of data. All you have to do, it says, is just give it your data. Bring it all safely into the House of Vector and then all your AI dreams will be realized.
Walk inside. There’s always someone who will show you around. Point out all the amazing architectural highlights. Tell you all about how the House of Vector provides approximate nearest neighbor search, support for high-dimensional embeddings, scalability, performance, and many other wonderful features.
But when you ask about ACID semantics, they look away. They tell you how developer friendly Vector can be.
Ask about analytic capabilities, and they tell you about their real-time ingest and indexing capabilities.
Talk to them about governance and security gaps, and they pat your head and tell you that there’s really nothing to worry about. Sure, some people might say that RBAC is missing or untuneable, but that won’t be a problem. AI is too smart for that. Or something. And the research that finds that PII can be inadvertently included in embeddings? That once data is converted into embeddings it circumvents traditional privacy controls? Nothing to see. Come look at our shiny hybrid search capabilities.
Isn’t it dangerous to give AI access to all your data? Nonsense! What could possibly go wrong? Surely no intern would ever ask awkward questions and get answers. Hackers? That only happens to someone else. Come look at all of our wonderful integrations.
And what about bringing all the data into the House of Vector? Isn’t that difficult, time-consuming, and never-ending? Nonsense again! It’s a simple matter of copying everything. How hard could that be?
But the real revelation comes when you slip away from the tour, slip into the room they rushed you past. That’s where you find other databases, so many other databases. Everything the House of Vector cannot do, all the various analytics it cannot perform. There, where the data is actually analyzed, it is also duplicated. Moved. Synchronized. Because the House of Vector does only one thing really and that thing is vector embeddings. It doesn’t do all the other things you need: analysis, transactions, governance. Those have to be done somewhere else and then everything kept in sync.
Looking closer you realize that the machinery only looks simple and futuristic. Beneath the surface, you find ETL that is intricate, convoluted, held together with baling wire and duct tape. Data leaks being rapidly patched, only for another leak to appear somewhere else. The House of Vector promises simplicity but delivers complexity. Brittleness. Expense. A labyrinth of pipes beyond mortal comprehension.
Why? Why follow that path? To use AI?
You can use AI without ever moving your data. You can leave it in place, search it, analyze it. SWIRL doesn’t care where your data is, or what format it’s in. Vector embeddings can be created on the fly, in memory, and then forgotten when they’ve served their purpose. AI only sees as much of your data as it needs to see in order to answer your questions. Security is preserved. You get answers without the risk and the complexity. Your data stays in your control.
Place your data in the House of Vector, spend untold months moving and copying everything, build your synchronization engine. In the end, your data will only end up trapped, trapped in yet another database that doesn’t do the routine things you need. Your data, trapped, suffocating behind a solid wall of technology. For the love of god, Montressor!
Or, another choice. Without ETL. Without complexity. Without the haunting sense that something will go wrong, that the complex system will break down, that your AI dream will become a centralization nightmare.
Zero ETL. Zero trust security. Zero additional complexity. Just the answers you need, when you need them.
SWIRL.