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by rbranson 601 days ago
One of the only (the only?) commercial grade implementations was launched recently by us at PlanetScale:

https://planetscale.com/blog/announcing-planetscale-vectors-...

3 comments

No ability to host offline, and for 1/8th CPU + 1GB RAM + 800 GB storage, the price is $1,224/month?

I'm sure it works great, but at that price point, I'm stuck with self-hosting Postgres+pgvector.

Just pointing out that what you're paying for is actually 3x these resources. By default you get a primary server and two replicas with whatever specification you choose. This is primarily for data durability, but you can also send queries to your replicas.
Which works completely fine as long as you know how to manage your own db without getting wrecked!

But yes, I it seems extereme. But it is also cheaper than hiring a dedicated postgres/db guy who will cost 5 to 10x more per month.

There are plenty of set-it-and-forget-it vector dbs right now, maybe too many![0]

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41985176

For sure, I personally use pgvector myself but I also don't have millions and millions of rows. I haven't messed with anything other than Pinecone so I can't speak to those services, but there's a big difference than a vector db for your own personal use and a chat app/search on a db with millions of users convos and docs, not sure how well these managed vector DB platforms scale, but you probably need the db guy anyways when you're using vectors at scale. Atleast I would.
What's the advantage of NN over vectordb anymore? Are we losing some info when we embed?
It works great. We’ve had SPANN in production since October of 2023 at https://turbopuffer.com/
SPANN is also implemented in the open-source Vespa.ai
Actual SPANN or janky "inspired by SPANN" IVF with HNSW in front? Only real SPANN (with SPTAG, and partitioning designed to work with SPTAG) delivers good results. A superficial read of the paper LOOKS like you can achieve similar results by throwing off the shelf components at it, but it doesn't actually work well.