qdrant VS ann-benchmarks

I'm currently looking to implement locally, using QDrant [1] for instance.

I'm just playing around, but it makes sense to have a runnable example for our users at work too :) [2].

[1]. https://qdrant.tech/

Also compare with qdrant's Rust implementation; they tout their performance. https://github.com/qdrant/qdrant/tree/master/lib/segment/src...

There are much better known examples, such as https://qdrant.tech/ and https://github.com/lancedb/lancedb

For more information, see our release notes. Qdrant is an open source project. We welcome your contributions; raise issues, or contribute via pull requests!

Initialize the Qdrant Client with in-memory storage. The collection name will be “imagebind_data” and we will be using cosine distance.

Qdrant is an open-source vector search engine optimized for performance and flexibility. It supports both exact and approximate nearest neighbor search, providing a balance between accuracy and speed for various AI and ML applications.

Qdrant serves as a vector database, optimized for handling high-dimensional data typically found in AI and ML applications. It's designed for efficient storage and retrieval of vectors, making it an ideal solution for managing the data produced and consumed by AI models like Mistral 7B. In our setup, Qdrant handles the storage of vectors generated by the language model, facilitating quick and accurate retrievals.

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.

There are very efficient algorithms for doing this, but of course it may still be expensive if your dataset is very large. See https://ann-benchmarks.com/ for some of the algorithms