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by alexgarcia-xyz 782 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.