Constructors, Converters, Descriptors, and Arithmetic Operators

Other basic vector operations for Oracle AI Vector Search involve creating, converting, and describing vectors.

• Vector Constructors

  TO_VECTOR() and VECTOR() are synonymous constructors of vectors. The functions take a string of type VARCHAR2 or CLOB as input and return a vector as output.

• Vector Serializers

  FROM_VECTOR() and VECTOR_SERIALIZE() are synonymous serializers of vectors. The functions take a vector as input and return a string of type VARCHAR2 or CLOB as output.

• VECTOR_NORM

  VECTOR_NORM returns the Euclidean norm of a vector as a BINARY_DOUBLE. This value is also called the magnitude or size and represents the Euclidean distance between the vector and the origin. For a vector v = (v1, v2, ..., vn), the Euclidean norm is given by ||v|| = SQRT(v12 + v22 + ... + vn2).

• VECTOR_DIMENSION_COUNT

  VECTOR_DIMENSION_COUNT returns the number of dimensions of a vector as a NUMBER.

• VECTOR_DIMS

  VECTOR_DIMS returns the number of dimensions of a vector as a NUMBER. VECTOR_DIMS is synonymous with VECTOR_DIMENSION_COUNT.

• VECTOR_DIMENSION_FORMAT

  VECTOR_DIMENSION_FORMAT returns the storage format of the vector. It returns a VARCHAR2, which can be one of the following values: INT8, FLOAT32, FLOAT64, or BINARY.

• Arithmetic Operators

  Addition, subtraction, and multiplication can be applied to vectors dimension-wise in SQL and PL/SQL.

• Aggregate Functions

  The aggregate functions SUM and AVG can be applied to a series of vectors dimension-wise.