Milvus VS pgvector

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.

Get started with Milvus on GitHub.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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 🥰

1. Milvus by Zilliz | Github

When talking about Vector Databases, in the market we can find the specialized ones and multi-model, most of the major database providers like Oracle, PostgreSQL or MongoDB, for mention some of them, have integrated a specific solution to retrieve vector data.

For this example, I wanted to focus on how pgvector  – an open-source vector similarity search for Postgres – can be used to identify data similarities that exist in enterprise data.

pgvector supports dense vector search well, but it does not have plan to support sparse vector.

There's an issue in the pgvector repo about someone having several ~10-20million row tables and getting acceptable performance with the right hardware and some performance tuning: https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector/issues/455

I'm in the early stages of evaluating pgvector myself. but having used pinecone I currently am liking pgvector better because of it being open source. The indexing algorithm is clear, one can understand and modify the parameters. Furthermore the database is postgresql, not a proprietary document store. When the other data in the problem is stored relationally, it is very convenient to have the vectors stored like this as well. And postgresql has good observability and metrics. I think when it comes to flexibility for specialized applications, pgvector seems like the clear winner. But I can definitely see pinecone's appeal if vector search is not a core component of the problem/business, as it is very easy to use and scales very easily

The Spring AI project aims to streamline the development of applications that incorporate artificial intelligence functionality without unnecessary complexity. On this example we use features like: Embedding, Prompts, ETL and save all embedding on PGvector(Postgres Vector database)

Official GitHub repository of the pgvector extension

pgvector 0.6.0 was just released and will be available on Supabase projects soon. Again, a special shout out to Andrew Kane and everyone else who worked on parallel index builds.

The pgvector extension adds vector similarity search capabilities to your PostgreSQL database. To use the extension, you have to first create it in your database. You can install the extension, by connecting to your database and running the CREATE EXTENSION command from the psql command prompt:

pgvector has you covered: https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector