What is the Weaviate BYOV (Bring Your Own Vectors) approach?

BYOV, or Bring Your Own Vectors, lets you embed data outside Weaviate and send vectors directly with ingest requests, bypassing Weaviate's vectorizer modules. This is useful when you need fine-grained control over the embedding pipeline, use a model not supported by any module, or want to batch-embed data in a separate job for cost reasons. You can mix BYOV with module-based vectorization per collection. Queries that bypass the vectorizer must also provide query vectors directly rather than using nearText.