dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaVextra: A Unified Middleware Abstraction for Heterogeneous Vector Database Systems
| Authors | Chandan Suri, Gursifath Bhasin |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | 2601.06727vv1 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06727 |
| License | http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ |
Abstract
The rapid integration of vector search into AI applications, particularly for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), has catalyzed the emergence of a diverse ecosystem of specialized vector databases. While this innovation offers a rich choice of features and performance characteristics, it has simultaneously introduced a significant challenge: severe API fragmentation. Developers face a landscape of disparate, proprietary, and often volatile API contracts, which hinders application portability, increases maintenance overhead, and leads to vendor lock-in. This paper introduces Vextra, a novel middleware abstraction layer designed to address this fragmentation. Vextra presents a unified, high-level API for core database operations, including data upsertion, similarity search, and metadata filtering. It employs a pluggable adapter architecture to translate these unified API calls into the native protocols of various backend databases. We argue that such an abstraction layer is a critical step towards maturing the vector database ecosystem, fostering interoperability, and enabling higher-level query optimization, while imposing minimal performance overhead.
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"abstract": "The rapid integration of vector search into AI applications, particularly for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), has catalyzed the emergence of a diverse ecosystem of specialized vector databases. While this innovation offers a rich choice of features and performance characteristics, it has simultaneously introduced a significant challenge: severe API fragmentation. Developers face a landscape of disparate, proprietary, and often volatile API contracts, which hinders application portability, increases maintenance overhead, and leads to vendor lock-in. This paper introduces Vextra, a novel middleware abstraction layer designed to address this fragmentation. Vextra presents a unified, high-level API for core database operations, including data upsertion, similarity search, and metadata filtering. It employs a pluggable adapter architecture to translate these unified API calls into the native protocols of various backend databases. We argue that such an abstraction layer is a critical step towards maturing the vector database ecosystem, fostering interoperability, and enabling higher-level query optimization, while imposing minimal performance overhead.",
"arxiv_id": "2601.06727",
"authors": [
"Chandan Suri",
"Gursifath Bhasin"
],
"categories": [
"cs.DB",
"cs.SE"
],
"license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
"title": "Vextra: A Unified Middleware Abstraction for Heterogeneous Vector Database Systems",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06727",
"version": "v1"
},
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