RIP, vector database

turbopuffer is rebuilding its storage engine to stop treating vectors as the primary index — ANN becomes another secondary index. The reason is boring and convincing: a vector-first layout caps block sizes at ANN cluster sizes (~100-200 docs), which starves everything else. When they reworked full-text search posting blocks to ~256 docs, indexes came out 10x smaller and queries up to 20x faster. “Vector database” was always a feature, not a category.