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tmaly
Ask HN: Alternatives to Vector DB?

A while back I was looking for a vector database that would work across Windows / Mac / Linux platforms. Some of the options required specific processors like Intel. I am curious if there are any alternatives to a Vector DB that can run cross platform and are easy to setup?


romanhn2 months ago

There's Postgres with pgvector extension.

bilater2 months ago

yup keep it simple. hybrid search on supabase with keyword + pg vector. use a good embedding model with inner product (not cosine so its faster). there was a good article about learnings in this space recently here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299659

saturn_vk2 months ago

Do you have recommendations for embedding models?

dghlsakjg2 months ago

This would be my vote.

There are probably more performant options, but for universality, you are best off going with a popular SQL DB that has vector extensions or support. SQLLite is another option if you want even more portability.

muzani2 months ago

pgvector is very performant for tiny scale, especially if they don't expect to update the knowledge base constantly and don't care about millisecond differences in speed. It's also probably the only major vector db with ACID. And it's substantially cheaper than many others.

I haven't looked into SQLite and such, but many of the other SQL type of options were not good last I checked. And it takes quite a bit of effort to dig through them because all of these will show research that puts themselves as the best lol.

redskyluan2 months ago

How is pg performed on windows? Never tried before

tmalyop2 months ago

I have used pg years ago on windows when it was like version 7, so I suspect it still works well.

codingmoney2 months ago

You can try Milvus, Weaviate, or Qdrant. They all support multiple platforms and are relatively easy to set up.

miZero02 months ago

+1 for Weaviate. It’s free, open source, cross platform and has a very active developer community with good docs/events/hackathons. Really friendly people to deal with in their community Slack too.

carlbren2 months ago

I use usearch for the engine https://github.com/unum-cloud/usearch/. It's fast. The vectors are stored in DB and added to usearch at startup for retreival. There is also FAISS.

geuis2 months ago

Postgres with pgvector extension. Have been using it in production for months and it works great.

bobosha2 months ago

We used Qdrant in production - it's a solid vector db offering and highly recommend. However we are moving everything to Postgres with pgvector for simplicity i.e fewer moving parts. It was a PITA keeping data synced between pgsql <> qdrant.

bitforge2 months ago

mind sharing what your embedding generation architecture looks like and what data sync issues you've encountered?

babyent2 months ago

Why not a Kafka pipeline?

schreiaj2 months ago

SQLite via libsql is my go to for lightweight stuff.

Has vector embedding columns out of the box.

tmalyop2 months ago

Thanks! I had no idea this existed.

andre-z2 months ago

Qdrant runs on Linux/Mac/Windows and on x86/ARM processors

yawnxyz2 months ago

if you have small data requirements (less than 100mb) I just run FAISS for embeddings and store the rows of data and vectors in JSON.

I then have a small python script to run a vector similarity algo like cosine similarity or whatever. It's not the fanciest or most efficient, but it works surprisingly well.

I use it to search/rank my own blog posts (~300+) for relevancy. So the entire thing is only like 10mb. Probably will get super slow for really large dataasets

samber2 months ago

Elasticsearch is a good bet, if you need to use multiple filters with your queries, and when you grow above the acceptable size of an in-memory database.

OutOfHere2 months ago

If you strictly want things that are not vector databases, you can choose to categorize each item with multi-hierarchical categories. To query, just filter for items belonging to the categories that interest you. As a bonus, this approach is a lot more interpretable than using embeddings.

jankovicsandras2 months ago

Postgres is a good idea.

Shameless plug: https://github.com/jankovicsandras/plpgsql_bm25

BM25 search implemented in PL/pgSQL, there's also an example of Hybrid (BM25+pgvector) search in the repo.

BenoitP2 months ago

Brute force it. Gemm routines can give you a best dot product among 300k vectors well under a second

vismit20002 months ago

Exactly. See this for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43162995

vismit20002 months ago

You might also want to take a look at: The best way to use text embeddings portably is with Parquet and Polars - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43162995

abraxas2 months ago

postgres pgvector is a decent implementation by now which is likely available in most setups that postgres will run on.

You can also use faiss if you want it all in memory at all times and have the RAM to support it.

What's your use case and the volume of vectors you want to look up?

tmalyop2 months ago

I have a knowledge store of all my notes in markdown. I wanted a way to incorporate them with RAG.

abraxas2 months ago

How many vectors is that? If under 100K then keep it all in memory. Hell probably in the low millions would be OK. You can literally write them to a flat file and load into memory and do a full scan for every lookup and it will be fast enough. If not then use faiss with hnsw indexing and it will be screaming fast.

jusob2 months ago

I've been using sqlite-vec, a module for sqlite3: https://github.com/asg017/sqlite-vec

softwaredoug2 months ago

There’s a bazillion python libraries and regular databases / search engines with vector indices that run cross platform. Postgres, hnswlib, Elasticsearch, etc.

Prosammer2 months ago

Check out lanceDB, it looks awesome for this.

redskyluan2 months ago

Running everything on windows plaform is not easy... maybe just run with a container?

usgroup2 months ago

The correct answer is duckdb with the vec extension :-)

kledru2 months ago

two years ago annoy library from spotify was good enough for small RAG, stored everything in single file...

bschmidt802 months ago

Can I ask what the use case is?

Always fascinated to hear why people are using vector DBs, especially outside AI embeddings

tmalyop2 months ago

I wanted something simple and easy to setup for RAG

bschmidt802 months ago

LlamaIndex VectorStoreIndex defaults to in-memory which allows you to get up and running very quickly - had pretty great experiences with their TS repo and even contributed a little to it.

fromDocuments -> VectorStoreIndex -> asQueryEngine it will be in-memory.

Easily add pgvector as other recommend here when/if you need to persist embedded data.

ayende2 months ago

Starting in v7.0, ravendb has ve tor search and ai integration Run on windows , linux and mac

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