A Developer's Guide to Exploring Milvus 2.6 Features on Zilliz Cloud

Milvus 2.6, now generally available on Zilliz Cloud, represents a significant advance in vector database capabilities, integrating formerly external functions directly into the system to enhance AI application development. This version introduces features like Embedding Functions, which transform raw text into vectors using third-party embedding services, simplifying the embedding workflow for developers. Additionally, Milvus 2.6 supports lexical highlighting to improve search result transparency, n-gram indexing for enhanced search performance, and decay ranking functions to prioritize more recent data. These features, alongside boosting mechanisms that re-rank results based on domain-specific metadata, reduce the need for external code, streamline application development, and improve query performance. The update reflects a trend towards converging database functionalities, allowing developers to perform complex operations directly within the database, which reduces latency and simplifies application architecture.