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Show HN: Postgres as a VectorDB GUI
- z-gort 2y agolmk if anyone has any thoughts...if I could go back I may have not gone through Electron Doing dimensionality reduction locally posed a few challenges in terms of application size--the idea was that by analyzing just a few thousand randomly sampled points you can get an idea of your data through a local GUI where you interact with your data and see some correlated metadata. Not sure if there's too much need for an individual GUI to go along with Postgres as a VectorDB, maybe people just do analysis separate from a normal "GUI"? But maybe not. What you think?
- maxchehab 2y agoJust some fast feedback, I can't copy & paste in the connection url input form. On a mac. Once loaded, I get the error "Table must contain a UUID column for vector visualization." I'm assuming it's trying to find an ID column for grouping? Can we manually specify this? My ID columns are varchars.
- garybake 2y agoSame here. I'm using langchain which creates a varchar id column. It also has different collections on the same table.
- thangngoc89 2y agoAs a non-native English speaker and not very familiar with vector database, the title seems very ambiguous to me. I understand it as Postgres as a GUI for some VectorDB. Upon closer inspection, I realized that "Postgres as a VectorDB" is a full name. Maybe shorten that thing to something else. Just my 2 cents.
- colechristensen 2y agoIt’s just plain bad grammar, the title should be “Show HN: Reservoirs Lab, a Postgres VectorDB GUI”
- monsieurbanana 2y agoI think the confusing term is "VectorDB" which sounds like a name of an existing product. "A vector db GUI powered by Postgres"?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wenc 2y agoThis is good, but could also be good to mention that you're using umap for dimensionality reduction with cosine metric. https://github.com/Z-Gort/Reservoirs-Lab/blob/main/src/electron/scripts/reduceDimension.py https://github.com/Z-Gort/Reservoirs-Lab/blob/main/src/elect... Dimensionality reduction from n >> 2 dimensions to 2 dimensions can be very fickle, so the hyperparameters matter. Your visualization can change significantly significantly depending on choice of metric. https://umap-learn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/parameters.html https://umap-learn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/parameters.html You may want to consider projecting to more than 2 dimensions too. You may ask, how does one visualize more than two dimensions? Through a scatterplot matrix of 2 axes at a time. https://seaborn.pydata.org/examples/scatterplot_matrix.html https://seaborn.pydata.org/examples/scatterplot_matrix.html These are used for PCA-type multivariate analyses to visualize latent variables in higher dimensions than 2, but 2 dimensions at a time. Some clustering behavior that cannot be seen in 2 axes might be seen in higher dimensions. We used to do this our lab to find anomalies in high dimensions.
- isoprophlex 2y agoAbout fickleness... indeed i've found this a kinda problematic thing when running large-d text embeddings through umap -- it always comes out spherical, blob-shaped, without any obvious segregation in the low-d projected space. IMO it's very difficult to make a "fire and forget" embedding interpreter. Maybe I never found the right parameters to umap but the results of running it (or any dimension reduction algo) always left me a bit underwhelmed.
- ddtaylor 2y agoDoes this use pgVector?
- z-gort 2y agoIt lets you visualize any column with type "EMBEDDING", and I think the only way to get that is through pgvector/pgvectorscale.
- gregncheese 2y agoI have yet to find a better tool than the old Tensorflow projector: https://projector.tensorflow.org/ https://projector.tensorflow.org/ Granted, it requires to prepare your data into TSV files first.
- wenc 2y agoThat is indeed an excellent tool. Allows one to dynamically adjust and recompute umap and t-sne.
- redwood 2y agoHave folks seen https://atlas.nomic.ai/ https://atlas.nomic.ai/ <-- absolutely beautiful vector visualization
- samanthasu 2y agoThat is excellent visualization!
- dmezzetti 2y agoVery interesting, thanks for sharing!
- paddy_m 2y agoREADME suggestions: Put the animated gif at the top Add subtitles to the gif explaining what you're doing.
- dcreater 2y agoIf I had a nickel for GUI/viz tools that bury the image/video or straight up don't have it in the readme.. lends credence to the popular opinion that engineers don't know how to communicate
- abadid 2y agoWhy use PostgreSQL instead of columnar databases that are likely to perform way better for these types of analytical workloads?