For my work, ES's 'killer feature' was not the search, but rather complex aggregations over huge datasets (despite the crazy query syntax). Hard to see how vector databases would replace that.
The complex aggregations are indeed an important feature for sophisticated search products like e-commerce search with interactive filtering. There is probably no easy way for a vector db to catch up quick. But,
- Most RAG and enterprise apps don't really need that level of sophistication in UX, what they need instead is simple and reliable infrastructure
- Give vector db some time to catch up. Google Spanner didn't have any SQL capability at the early days, but they caught up after a few years, now with full SQL support. And SQL is probably more complex than Elasticsearch's aggregation.
