canopy VS Druid

Pinecone: A scalable vector database service that facilitates efficient similarity search in high-dimensional spaces. Ideal for building real-time applications in AI, such as personalized recommendation engines and content-based retrieval systems.

In this post we’ll build a Python script that uses StripeDocs Reader, a loader on LlamaIndex, that creates vector embeddings of Stripe's documentation in Pinecone. This allows a user to ask questions about Stripe Docs to an LLM, in this case OpenAI, and receive a generated response.

Pinecone is a managed vector database service that simplifies the process of building and scaling vector search applications. It offers a simple API for embedding vector search into applications, providing accurate, scalable similarity search with minimal setup and maintenance.

In case of AIMD, I am doing this all in-memory, but you could also do this in a database (e.g. Pinecone). It all depends on how much data you have and how much compute you have available.

A RAG implementation's quality and performance highly depend on the similarity-based search of embeddings. The challenge arises from the fact that embeddings are usually high-dimensional vectors, and the knowledge base may have many documents. It's not surprising that the popularity of LLM catalyzed the development of specialized vector databases like Pinecone and Weaviate. However, SQL databases are also evolving to meet the new challenge.

In the dynamic world of web development, Python has emerged as a dominant force, especially in backend development – the primary focus of this blog post. Although it's worth mentioning that there are ongoing efforts to use Python for the frontend as well, like Reflex (previously known as Pynecone, they presumably had to change their name because of Pinecone vector database), which even garnered support from Y Combinator. Samuel Colvin (creator of Pydantic) is also working on FastUI (he literally just released the first version in December 2023).

Apache Druid

Apache Druid: Focused on real-time analytics and interactive queries on large datasets. Druid is well-suited for high-performance applications in user-facing analytics, network monitoring, and business intelligence.

Online analytical processing (OLAP) databases like Apache Druid, Apache Pinot, and ClickHouse shine in addressing user-initiated analytical queries. You might write a query to analyze historical data to find the most-clicked products over the past month efficiently using OLAP databases. When contrasting with streaming databases, they may not be optimized for incremental computation, leading to challenges in maintaining the freshness of results. The query in the streaming database focuses on recent data, making it suitable for continuous monitoring. Using streaming databases, you can run queries like finding the top 10 sold products where the “top 10 product list” might change in real-time.

https://github.com/apache/druid

It's always a question of tradeoffs.

The awesome-selfhosted project has a nice list of open-source analytics projects. It's really good inspiration to dig into these projects and find out about the technology choices that other open-source tools in the space have made.

Spencer Kimball (now CEO at CockroachDB) wrote an interesting article on this topic in 2021 where they created spencerkimball/stargazers based on a Python script. So I started thinking: could I create a data pipeline using Nifi and Kafka (two OSS tools often used with Druid) to get the API data into Druid - and then use SQL to do the analytics? The answer was yes! And I have documented the outcome below. Here’s my analytical pipeline for Github stars data using Nifi, Kafka and Druid.

Apache Druid is part of the modern data architecture. It uses a special data format designed for analytical workloads, using extreme parallelisation to get data in and get data out. A shared-nothing, microservices architecture helps you to build highly-available, extreme scale analytics features into your applications.

Apache Druid

But then you realize there are other databases out there focused specifically on analytical use cases with lots of data and complex queries. Newcomers like ClickHouse, Pinot, and Druid (all open source) respond to a new class of problem: The need to develop applications using endpoints published on analytical queries that were previously confined only to the data warehouse and BI tools.

Datadog's product is a bit too close to Apache Druid to have named their design system so similarly.

From https://druid.apache.org/ :

> Druid unlocks new types of queries and workflows for clickstream, APM, supply chain, network telemetry, digital marketing, risk/fraud, and many other types of data. Druid is purpose built for rapid, ad-hoc queries on both real-time and historical data.

Maybe rare for someone to be seeking their first coding job at that age. But plenty of us are in our 50s or older and still coding up a storm. And not necessarily ancient tech or anything. My current project exposes analytics data from Apache Druid and Cassandra via Go microservices hosted in K8s.