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by dmezzetti 774 days ago
Author of txtai here - great work with this extension.

I wouldn't consider it a "this or that" decision. While txtai does combine Faiss and SQLite, it could also utilize this extension. The same task was just done for Postgres + pgvector. txtai is not tied to any particular backend components.

1 comments

Ya I worded this part awkwardly - I was hinting that querying a vector index and joining with metadata with sqlite + sqlite-vec (in a single SQL join) will probably be faster than other methods, like txtai, which do the joining phase in a higher level like Python. Which isn't a fair comparison, especially since txtai can switch to much faster vector stores, but I think is fair for most embedded use-cases.

That being said, txtai offers way more than sqlite-vec, like builtin embedding models and other nice LLM features, so it's definitely apples to oranges.

I'll keep an eye on this extension.

With this, what DuckDB just added and pgvector, we're seeing a blurring of the lines. Back in 2021, there wasn't a RDBMS that had native vector support. But native vector integration makes it possible for txtai to just run SQL-driven vector queries...exciting times.

I think systems that bet on existing databases eventually catching up (as is txtai's model) vs trying to reinvent the entire database stack will win out.