Weaviate 1.40 Release

Weaviate 1.40 makes dropping an unused named vector generally available. It frees that vector's disk space and index memory while keeping the collection's other named vectors and object data.

A drop can't be undone. To restore the vector, you'll need to add it again and re-vectorize or re-import the objects.

The release also makes 4-bit Rotational Quantization generally available. Weaviate reports similar recall to 8-bit RQ with a 45% heap reduction on a 1536-dimension dataset. HFresh gains multi-vector embeddings through MUVERA, and PathSeer joins the HNSW filter strategies.

Version 1.40 is available open-source and on Weaviate Cloud. If your server sets DEFAULT_VECTORIZER_MODULE, check the vector configuration defaults breaking change before upgrading.