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You Don't Need a Vector Database
- noemit 7mo agoThe Vector Database obsession came from RAG, which came from a marketing idea to calm down enterprise fears about hallucination with RAG. Will save this article because I feel like I have this conversation weekly when people think they need a vector database for something they definitely do not.
- kencho 7mo agoExactly. We talk to teams every week who spent a month setting up pinecone or qdrant and then realize they just needed search that worked. The vector database became the default answer to every search problem because of the RAG hype cycle, even when the actual need is way simpler
- le-mark 7mo agoCan you describe when the actual need is much simpler? I mean throwing documents into elastic search is really easy and the search is really good.
- kencho 7mo agoone use case we're handling right now is for a large online auction marketplace. they needed to automatically categorize 40,000 newly uploaded images per week. no tags, no metadata from the sellers, just raw photos. elasticsearch can't look at an image and tell you it's a vintage rolex or a mid-century lamp. they needed search that understands visual content, not text that's the kind of problem where keyword search doesn't apply at all, no matter how good the engine is
- simonjgreen 7mo ago> Spent a month setting up Pinecone? Really?
- kencho 7mo agothere's a lot more in "setting up" than creating an account and a collection on pinecone or any other service
- alansaber 7mo agoThat RAG is marketing and doesn't significantly affect performance is incorrect. As to whether retrieval really benefits from vector DBs is another question.
- sirfz 7mo agoYou don't need a vector db, you just need np.dot
- kenforthewin 7mo agoIf I understand correctly, the vecstore product is an api that wraps a vector database (among other features). So the pitch here is something like “you don’t need a vector database, you need an api wrapper to a vector database that we manage for you”.
- _puk 7mo agoSo the classic build vs buy question
- SirHumphrey 7mo agoI was asking myself the whole article “what does this mysterious semantic search api actually do?” and was a bit underwhelmed when the result came out to be - managed vector database.
- EspadaV9 7mo agoIf you need to store vector, surely the easiest solution is to run `CREATE EXTENSION vector`. When, or if, you need more, then look at alternatives, but I'm sure most people will have a much easier time just adding it to their existing database.
- canpan 7mo agoPgvector is definitely the easiest way to get started. I did not really get the problem the article was trying to sell. Setting up an ingestion pipeline to your existing db, vs ingesting into yet another db seems to not solve a problem I have. If there was one thing I wish pgvector was better at, it would be to allow composite indexes (ie find vector where category). But it's a minor point.
- mergisi 7mo ago[dead]
- exhost 7mo ago> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
- cpursley 7mo agoOr you could just use the new BM25 extension and if thats not enough, bring in the vector extension, which you can run as hybrid and not have to bolt yet another paid 3rd party thing: https://postgresisenough.dev/tools?category=search https://postgresisenough.dev/tools?category=search
- kencho 7mo agopgvector is great if you're already on postgres and only need text search. funny enough, Neon Postgres actually featured us in a case study about this exact topic. we replaced pinecone and rds with neon under the hood: https://neon.com/blog/vecstore-replacing-pinecone-and-rds-with-neon https://neon.com/blog/vecstore-replacing-pinecone-and-rds-wi... the gap shows up when you need image search, face search, or content moderation on top of text search. that's where a dedicated api makes more sense than rolling your own on postgres
- alansaber 7mo agoExactly this, hybrid search (weighted in favor of a good sparse retrieval strategy) is universally the best way to go.
- stephantul 7mo agoThis is a thinly veiled commercial, not really useful.
- hbogert 7mo agoYou don't just need a vector db, you need ours!