multiversion-concurrency-control VS ann-benchmarks

The code is in this repository https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-control in MultiplexingThread.java and MultiplexProgramParser.java

https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-contro...

And I implemented a 3 way text diff with myers algorithm based on https://blog.jcoglan.com/2017/02/12/the-myers-diff-algorithm...

https://github.com/samsquire/text-diff

I implemented an eventually consistent mesh protocol that uses timestamps to provide last write wins

I think I lean towards per-thread sharding instead of mutex based or lock free data structures except for lockfree ringbuffers.

You can get embarassingly parallel performance if you split your data by thread and aggregate periodically.

If you need a consistent view of your entire set of data, that is slow path with sharding.

In my experiments with multithreaded software I simulate a bank where many bankaccounts are randomly withdrawn from and deposited to. https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-contro...

I get 700 million requests per second due to the sharding of money over accounts.

If you want some sample code to implement MVCC, I implemented MVCC in multithreaded Java as a toy example

https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-contro...

First read TransactionC.java then read MVCC.java

I wrote an unrolled switch statement in Java to simulate eager async/await across treads.

https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-contro...

The goal is that a compiler should generate this for you. This code is equivalent to the following:

   task1:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch16-00-concurrency.html

I've been working on implementing Java async/await state machine with switch statements and a scheduling loop. If the user doesn't await the async task handle, then the task's returnvalue is never handled. This is similar to the Go problem with the go statement.

https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-contro...

If your async call returns a handle and

yield value2++

https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-contro...

I am still working on allowing multiple coroutines to be in flight in parallel at the same time. At the moment the tasks share the same background thread.

I asked this stackoverflow question regarding C++ coroutines, as I wanted to use coroutines with a thread pool.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74520133/how-can-i-pass-...

This is very interesting. Thank you for submitting this and thank you for working on this.

I am highly interested in parallelism and high concurrency. I implemented multiversion concurrency control in Java.

https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-contro...

I am curious how to handle replication with high concurrency. I'm not sure how you detect dangerous reads+writes to the same key (tuples/fields) across different replica machines. In other words, multiple master.

I am aware Google uses truetime and some form of timestamp ordering and detection of interfering timestamps. But I'm not sure how to replicate that.

I began working on an algorithm to synchronize database records, do a sort, then a hash for each row where hash(row) = hash(previous_row.hash + row.data)

Then do a binary search on hashes matching/not matching. This is a synchronization algorithm I'm designing that requires minimal data transfer but multiple round trips.

The binary search would check the end of the data set for hash(replica_a.row[last]) == hash(replica_b.row[last]) then split the hash list in half and check the middle item, this shall tell you which row and which columns are different.

On top of my head, pgvector only supports 2 indexes, those are running in memory only. They don't support GPU indexing, nor Disk based indexing, they also don't have separation of query and insertions.

Also with different people I've talked to, they struggle with scale past 100K-1M vector.

You can also have a look yourself from a performance perspective: https://ann-benchmarks.com/

https://ann-benchmarks.com/ is a good resource covering those libraries and much more.

We utilized the ANN Benchmarks methodology, a standard for benchmarking vector databases. Our tests used the dbpedia dataset of 1,000,000 OpenAI embeddings (1536 dimensions) and inner product distance metric for both Pinecone and pgvector.

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/

(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.

[0]: https://github.com/erikbern/ann-benchmarks/

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).

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.

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.