You Shouldn't Invest in Vector Databases?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • txtai

    💡 All-in-one open-source embeddings database for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows

  • 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}

  • faiss

    A library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors.

  • 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}

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • pgvecto.rs

    Scalable, Low-latency and Hybrid-enabled Vector Search in Postgres. Revolutionize Vector Search, not Database.

  • It's kind of a tradeoff. Performance is just one factor when choosing the vector database. In pgvecto.rs https://github.com/tensorchord/pgvecto.rs, we store the index separately from PostgreSQL's internal storage, unlike pgvector's approach. This enable us to get multi-threaded indexing, async indexing without blocking the insertion, and faster search speed comparing to pgvector.

    I don't see any fundamental reason why the index in Postgres would be slower than a specialized vector database. The query pattern of the vector database is simply a point query using an index, similar to other queries in an OLTP system.

    The only limitation I see is scalability. It's not easy to make PostgreSQL distributed, but solutions like Citus exist, making it still possible.

    (I'm the author of pgvecto.rs)

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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