ann-benchmarks
Milvus
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ann-benchmarks | Milvus | |
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50 | 104 | |
4,568 | 26,490 | |
- | 3.0% | |
8.1 | 10.0 | |
1 day ago | 6 days ago | |
Python | Go | |
MIT License | Apache License 2.0 |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
ann-benchmarks
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Approximate Nearest Neighbors Oh Yeah
https://ann-benchmarks.com/ is a good resource covering those libraries and much more.
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Vector database is not a separate database category
Data warehouses are columnar stores. They are very different from row-oriented databases - like Postgres, MySQL. Operations on columns - e.g., aggregations (mean of a column) are very efficient.
Most vector databases use one of a few different vector indexing libraries - FAISS, hnswlib, and scann (google only) are popular. The newer vector dbs, like weaviate, have introduced their own indexes, but i haven't seen any performance difference -
Reference: https://ann-benchmarks.com/
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How We Made PostgreSQL a Better Vector Database
(Blog author here). Thanks for the question. In this case the index for both DiskANN and pgvector HNSW is small enough to fit in memory on the machine (8GB RAM), so there's no need to touch the SSD. We plan to test on a config where the index size is larger than memory (we couldn't this time due to limitations in ANN benchmarks [0], the tool we use).
To your question about RAM usage, we provide a graph of index size. When enabling PQ, our new index is 10x smaller than pgvector HNSW. We don't have numbers for HNSWPQ in FAISS yet.
- Do we think about vector dbs wrong?
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Vector Search with OpenAI Embeddings: Lucene Is All You Need
In terms of "All You Need" for Vector Search, ANN Benchmarks (https://ann-benchmarks.com/) is a good site to review when deciding what you need. As with anything complex, there often isn't a universal solution.
txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai) can build indexes with Faiss, Hnswlib and Annoy. All 3 libraries have been around at least 4 years and are mature. txtai also supports storing metadata in SQLite, DuckDB and the next release will support any JSON-capable database supported by SQLAlchemy (Postgres, MariaDB/MySQL, etc).
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Vector databases: analyzing the trade-offs
pg_vector doesn't perform well compared to other methods, at least according to ANN-Benchmarks (https://ann-benchmarks.com/).
txtai is more than just a vector database. It also has a built-in graph component for topic modeling that utilizes the vector index to autogenerate relationships. It can store metadata in SQLite/DuckDB with support for other databases coming. It has support for running LLM prompts right with the data, similar to a stored procedure, through workflows. And it has built-in support for vectorizing data into vectors.
For vector databases that simply store vectors, I agree that it's nothing more than just a different index type.
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Vector Dataset benchmark with 1536/768 dim data
The reason https://ann-benchmarks.com is so good, is that we can see a plot of recall vs latency. I can see you have some latency numbers in the leaderboard at the bottom, but it's very difficult to make a decision.
As a practitioner that works with vector databases every day, just latency is meaningless to me, because I need to know if it's fast AND accurate, and what the tradeoff is! You can't have it both ways. So it would be helpful if you showed plots showing this tradeoff, similar to ann-benchmarks.
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Do we need a specialized vector database?
The article makes the argument that it is easier to query vector spaces when your database already supports them: why use an external vector db when you can use pgvector in postgreSQL ?
That is a fine argument if you don't mind that pgvector is second-to-worst amongst all open-source vector search implementations, and two orders of magnitude slower than the state of the art [1].
The author also makes the argument that traditional DBs are better because they are battle-tested, and then goes and rewrites the pgvector plugin from C to rust.
- Unum: Vector Search engine in a single file
- Comparison of Vector Databases
Milvus
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Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2024)
Zilliz (zilliz.com) | Hybrid/ONSITE (SF, NYC) | Full-time
I am part of the hiring team for DevRel
NYC - https://boards.greenhouse.io/zilliz/jobs/4307910005
SF - https://boards.greenhouse.io/zilliz/jobs/4317590005
Zilliz is the company behind Milvus (https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus), the most starred vector database on GitHub. Milvus is a distributed vector database that shines in 1B+ vector use cases. Examples include autonomous driving, e-commerce, and drug discovery. (and, of course, RAG)
We are also hiring for other roles that I am not personally involved in the hiring process for such as product managers, software engineers, and recruiters.
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Milvus VS pgvecto.rs - a user suggested alternative
2 projects | 13 Mar 2024
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How to choose the right type of database
Milvus: An open-source vector database designed for AI and ML applications. It excels in handling large-scale vector similarity searches, making it suitable for recommendation systems, image and video retrieval, and natural language processing tasks.
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Simplifying the Milvus Selection Process
Github Repository
Selecting the right version of open-source Milvus is important to the success of any project leveraging vector search technology. With Milvus offering different versions of its vector database tailored to varying requirements, understanding the significance of selecting the correct version is key for achieving desired outcomes.
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7 Vector Databases Every Developer Should Know!
Milvus is an open-source vector database designed to handle large-scale similarity search and vector indexing. It supports multiple index types and offers highly efficient search capabilities, making it suitable for a wide range of AI and ML applications, including image and video recognition, natural language processing, and recommendation systems.
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Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2024)
Zilliz is hiring! We're looking for REMOTE and/or HYBRID roles in SF
Zilliz is the company behind Milvus (https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus), the most widely adopted vector database. Vector databases are a crucial piece of any technology stack looking to take advantage of unstructured data. Most recently and notably, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). For RAG, vector databases like Milvus are used as the tool to inject customized data. In other words, vector databases make things like customized chat bots, personalized product recommendations, and more possible.
We are hiring for Developer Advocates, Senior+ Level Engineers and Product people, and Talent Acquisition. Check out all the roles here: https://zilliz.com/careers
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Qdrant, the Vector Search Database, raised $28M in a Series A round
Good on them, I know the crustaceans are out here happy about this raise for a Rust based Vector DB!
(now I'm gonna plug what I work on)
If you're interested in a more scalable vector database written in Go, check out Milvus (https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus)
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Open Source Advent Fun Wraps Up!
But before we do, I do want to say that 🤩 all these lovely Open-Source projects would love a little 🎉💕 love by getting a GitHub star ⭐ for their efforts. Including Open Source Milvus 🥰
What are some alternatives?
pgvector - Open-source vector similarity search for Postgres
faiss - A library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors.
qdrant - Qdrant - High-performance, massive-scale Vector Database for the next generation of AI. Also available in the cloud https://cloud.qdrant.io/
Weaviate - Weaviate is an open-source vector database that stores both objects and vectors, allowing for the combination of vector search with structured filtering with the fault tolerance and scalability of a cloud-native database.
Elasticsearch - Free and Open, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
Face Recognition - The world's simplest facial recognition api for Python and the command line
vald - Vald. A Highly Scalable Distributed Vector Search Engine
nmslib - Non-Metric Space Library (NMSLIB): An efficient similarity search library and a toolkit for evaluation of k-NN methods for generic non-metric spaces.
annoy - Approximate Nearest Neighbors in C++/Python optimized for memory usage and loading/saving to disk
CompreFace - Leading free and open-source face recognition system