qdrant VS annoy

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.

The focus on the top 10 in vector search is a product of wanting to prove value over keyword search. Keyword search is going to miss some conceptual matches. You can try to work around that with tokenization and complex queries with all variations but it's not easy.

Vector search isn't all that new a concept. For example, the annoy library (https://github.com/spotify/annoy) has been around since 2014. It was one of the first open source approximate nearest neighbor libraries. Recommendations have always been a good use case for vector similarity.

Recommendations are a natural extension of search and transformers models made building the vectors for natural language possible. To prove the worth of vector search over keyword search, the focus was always on showing how the top N matches include results not possible with keyword search.

In 2023, there has been a shift towards acknowledging keyword search also has value and that a combination of vector + keyword search (aka hybrid search) operates in the sweet spot. Once again this is validated through the same benchmarks which focus on the top 10.

On top of all this, there is also the reality that the vector database space is very crowded and some want to use their performance benchmarks for marketing.

Disclaimer: I am the author of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai), an open source embeddings database

If you want to go larger you could still use some simple setup in conjunction with faiss, annoy or hnsw.

If you need large scale (1000+ dimension, millions+ source points, >1000 queries per second) and accept imperfect results / approximate nearest neighbors, then other people have already mentioned some of the best libraries (FAISS, Annoy).

I like Faiss but I tried Spotify's annoy[1] for a recent project and was pretty impressed.

Since lots of people don't seem to understand how useful these embedding libraries are here's an example. I built a thing that indexes bouldering and climbing competition videos, then builds an embedding of the climber's body position per frame. I then can automatically match different climbers on the same problem.

It works pretty well. Since the body positions are 3D it works reasonably well across camera angles.

The biggest problem is getting the embedding right. I simplified it a lot above because I actually need to embed the problem shape itself because otherwise it matches too well: you get frames of people in identical positions but on different problems!

[1] https://github.com/spotify/annoy

If you just want quick in memory search then pynndescent is a decent option: it's easy to install, and easy to get running. Another good option is Annoy; it's just as easy to install and get running with python, but it is a little less performant if you want to do a lot of queries, or get a knn-graph quickly.

Probably I won't be bale to explain better than it's stated on annoy page: https://github.com/spotify/annoy But the bottom line is speed. Instead of computing similarities of embeddings one by one you do it via index that works way faster.

Perhaps you can store your embeddings anywhere (sql or even a file) and use Approximate Nearest Neighbors like https://github.com/spotify/annoy for comparison?