Atlas Vector Search Once Again Voted Most Loved Vector Database

The 2024 Retool State of AI report has just been released, and for the second year in a row, MongoDB Atlas Vector Search was named the most loved vector database. Atlas Vector Search received the highest net promoter score (NPS), a measure of how likely a user is to recommend a solution to their peers.

The Retool State of AI report is a global annual survey of developers, tech leaders, and IT decision-makers that provides insights into the current and future state of AI, including vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI adoption, and challenges innovating with AI.

MongoDB Atlas Vector Search commanded the highest NPS in Retool’s inaugural 2023 report, and it was the second most widely used vector database within just five months of its release. This year, Atlas Vector Search came in a virtual tie for the most popular vector database, with 21.1% of the vote, just a hair behind pgvector (PostgreSQL), which received 21.3%.

The survey also points to the increasing adoption of RAG as the preferred approach for generating more accurate answers with up-to-date and relevant context that large language models (LLMs) aren't trained on. Although LLMs are trained on huge corpuses of data, not all of that data is up to date, nor does it reflect proprietary data. And in those areas where blindspots exist, LLMs are notorious for confidently providing inaccurate "hallucinations." Fine-tuning is one way to customize the data that LLMs are trained on, and 29.3% of Retool survey respondents leverage this approach. But among enterprises with more than 5,000 employees, one-third now leverage RAG for accessing time-sensitive data (such as stock market prices) and internal business intelligence, like customer and transaction histories.

This is where MongoDB Atlas Vector Search truly shines. Customers can easily utilize their stored data in MongoDB to augment and dramatically improve the performance of their generative AI applications, during both the training and evaluation phases.

In the course of one year, vector database utilization among Retool survey respondents rose dramatically, from 20% in 2023 to an eye-popping 63.6% in 2024. Respondents reported that their primary evaluation criteria for choosing a vector database were performance benchmarks (40%), community feedback (39.3%), and proof-of-concept experiments (38%).

One of the pain points the report clearly highlights is difficulty with the AI tech stack. More than 50% indicated they were either somewhat satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with their AI stack. Respondents also reported difficulty getting internal buy-in, which is often complicated by procurement efforts when a new solution needs to be onboarded. One way to reduce much of this friction is through an integrated suite of solutions that streamlines the tech stack and eliminates the need to onboard multiple unknown vendors. Vector search is a native feature of MongoDB's developer data platform, Atlas, so there's no need to bolt on a standalone solution. If you're already using MongoDB Atlas, creating AI-powered experiences involves little more than adding vector data into your existing data collections in Atlas.

If you're a developer and want to start using Atlas Vector Search to start building generative AI-powered apps, we have several helpful resources:

• Learn how to build an AI research assistant agent that uses MongoDB as the memory provider, Fireworks AI for function calling, and LangChain for integrating and managing conversational components.

• Get an introduction to LangChain and MongoDB Vector Search and learn to create your own chatbot that can read lengthy documents and provide insightful answers to complex queries.

• Watch Sachin Smotra of Dataworkz as he delves into the intricacies of scaling RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) applications.

• Read our tutorial that shows you how to combine Google Gemini's advanced natural language processing with MongoDB, facilitated by Vertex AI Extensions to enhance the accessibility and usability of your database.

• Browse our Resources Hub for articles, analyst reports, case studies, white papers, and more.