[gk1]

Full disclosure: I work for Pinecone, which is conspicuously absent from the write-up despite being the first and most popular vector database.

While it’s great to see efforts to make sense of the (admittedly noisy) vector database market, I’m struggling to grok large chunks of this. For example I can’t tell what the author means by “serverless”, but given that they put a whole bunch of open-source, self-hosted solutions in that part of the diagram it’s definitely not the commmonly understood meaning.

For anyone diving into the topic, here is another introductory article to help you: https://www.pinecone.io/learn/vector-database/

[dmezzetti]

Pinecone is not absent and it's definitely not the first vector database.

[chaxor]

This little thread helps solidify my opinions towards using only the few in the small section they point out, being Qdrant, chroma, or weaviate. The fact that someone who works at pinecone didn't take the time to read an article in their field, decided to comment anyway, and then stated they didn't know what serverless or embedded may mean with regard to databases pretty much sums up the state of many vector databases, especially pubecone imo.

I don't even really love Qdrant or chroma (haven't tried weaviate, but it's at least in the right region according to the article), but at least they are embedded.

I pretty much refuse to use any DB that requires using API keys, putting data off premises, and even if it requires setting up ACL. I don't even use postgres much for the complex ACL and having to set up ports reason.

SQLite and DuckDB are truly incredible, can store gigantic databases (>2TB is still perfectly quite performant) and you can just hand any collaborator the entire DB on a disk, without having to worry about complex password junk.

[fnordpiglet]

I have to agree here - including pinecone in the images of major competitors but doing absolutely no analysis of the product is bizarre. I would expect almost everyone would come into the article aware of pinecone and pg_vector, and often just at a “it’s a leading vector database but that’s all I know” level. It leaves a giant question mark in my mind of how pinecone fits into the space of competitors. It’s absence (beyond an image with its name called out) is baffling.

I am also a bit surprised at the hostility to the pinecone employee here. I see a bunch of other companies and projects jumping in and everything is cool. But for some reason the pinecone dude catches a lot of grief.

What’s going on? Is there some weird toxic subculture in the vector database space that’s got it’s knives kit for pinecone for some reason?

[bobvanluijt]

> Is there some weird toxic subculture in the vector database space

(I work for Weaviate)

Unfortunately, some players in the space (who are on this list) are cheating and playing an unfair game. I guess that this comes with a rapidly growing space.

I hope we can all quickly go back to focussing on our respective communities and educating the market (together) on the awesome things one can do with vector DBs.

[dbmikus]

Just ctrl-f "pinecone" and got nothing.

edit: pinecone is mentioned in the earlier parts of the blog series, though.

[dmezzetti]

It's in both the images discussing the players in the space.

[aabhay]

Umm.. perhaps look at the images?

[bobvanluijt]

> despite being the first […]

This is false

> […] and most popular vector database

Based on what?