cozo VS faiss

I can figure parts of it out from https://github.com/cozodb/cozo/blob/main/cozo-core/tests/air_routes.rs which is enough to get started

I've been keeping an eye on https://github.com/cozodb/cozo which is pretty close to something I've wanted, a sqlite version of datalog/datomic.

Finally, the one product I was extremely impressed with and felt was genuinely impressive as a database in general was cozodb.

Take a look at cozodb. It meets most of your goals and I've been really enjoying using it. It might give you some inspiration or something to contribute to.

Sure. They're called 'partials' sometimes. Useful if you want to rerender just part of a page. This is a pattern used by HTMX, a 'js framework' that accepts fragments of html in an http response and injects it into the page. This is good because it avoids the flash and state loss of a whole page reload. See the HTMX essay on template fragments for a more complete argument [0].

This is a go template for an interactive todos app [1] that I'm experimenting with. The html content of the entire page is present in one template definition which is split into 6 inline {{block}} definitions / "fragments". The page supports 5 interactions indicated by {{define}} definitions, each of which reuse various block fragments relevant to that interaction. I'm in the process of converting it to use embedded cozodb [2] queries which act as a server side data store. The idea here is that the entire 'app', including all html fragments, styles, http requests and responses, db schema, and queries are embedded into this single 100-line file.

[0]: https://htmx.org/essays/template-fragments/

[1]: https://github.com/infogulch/go-htmx/blob/master/templates/t...

[2]: https://github.com/cozodb/cozo

If anyone wants to try a FOSS vector-relational-graph hybrid database for more complicated workloads than simple vector search, here it is: https://github.com/cozodb/cozo/

About the integrated vector search: https://docs.cozodb.org/en/latest/releases/v0.6.html

It also does duplicate detection (Minhash-LSH) and full-text search within the query language itself: https://docs.cozodb.org/en/latest/releases/v0.7.html

HN discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35641164

Disclaimer: I wrote it.

You are probably talking about this cozo.

There are also FAISS binary indexes[0], so it'd be great to compare binary index vs binary index. Otherwise it seems a little misleading to say it is a FAISS vs not FAISS comparison, since really it would be a binary index vs not binary index comparison. I'm not too familiar with binary indexes, so if there's a significant difference between the types of binary index then it'd be great to explain what that is too.

[0] https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss/wiki/Binary-indexe...

Or just use FAISS https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss

You can try txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai) with a Faiss backend.

This Faiss wiki article might help (https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss/wiki/Indexing-1G-v...).

For example, a partial Faiss configuration with 4-bit PQ quantization and only using 5% of the data to train an IVF index is shown below.

faiss={"components": "IVF,PQ384x4fs", "sample": 0.05}

If you want to experiment with vector stores, you can do that locally with something like faiss which has good platform support: https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss

Doing full retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and getting LLMs to interpret the results has more steps but you get a lot of flexibility, and there's no standard best-practice. When you use a vector DB you get the most similar texts back (or an index integer in the case of faiss), you then feed those to an LLM like a normal prompt.

The codifer for the RAG workflow is LangChain, but their demo is substantially more complex and harder-to-use than even a homegrown implementation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36725982

According to this documentation page, faiss-gpu is only supported on Linux, not on Windows.

Indexes for vector databases in high dimensions are nowhere near are effective as the 2-d indexes used in GIS or the 1-d B-tree indexes that are commonly used in databases.

Back around 2005 I was interested in similarity search and read a lot of conference proceedings on the top and was basically depressed at the state of vector database indexes and felt that at least for the systems I was prototyping I was OK with a full scan and later in 2013 I had the assignment of getting a search engine for patents using vector embeddings in front of customers and we got performance we found acceptable with full scan.

My impression today is that the scene is not too different than it was in 2005 but I can't say I haven't missed anything. That is, you have tradeoffs between faster algorithms that miss some results and slower algorithms that are more correct.

I think it's already a competitive business. You have Pinecone which had the good fortune of starting before the gold rush. Many established databases are adding vector extension. I know so many engineering managers who love postgresql and they're just going to load a vector extension and go. My RSS reader YOShInOn uses SBERT embeddings to cluster and classify text and certainly More Like This and semantic search are on the agenda, I'd expect it to take about an hour to get

https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss

up and working, I could spend more time stuck on some "little" front end problem like getting something to look right in Bootstrap than it would take to get working.

I can totally believe somebody could make a better vector db than what's out there but will it be better enough? A startup going through YC now could spend 2-3 to get a really good product and find customers and that is forever in a world where everybody wants to build AI applications right now.

As the size of the codebase grows, storing and searching through embeddings in memory becomes inefficient. This is where vector databases come into play. Tools like Milvus, Faiss, and others are designed to handle large-scale vector data and provide efficient similarity search capabilities. I've wrtten about how to also use sqlite to store vector embeddings. By integrating a vector database, you can scale your code search tool to handle much larger codebases without compromising on search speed.

But FAISS has their own version ("FastScan") https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss/wiki/Fast-accumula...

https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss