July 19th, 2024

Postgres vs. Pinecone

Postgres and Pinecone differ in performance and cost. Pinecone criticizes Postgres for index issues, while Postgres showcases superior performance with tweaks, specialized indexes, and cost-effectiveness, offering transparency and customization.

Read original articleLink Icon
Postgres vs. Pinecone

The comparison between Postgres and Pinecone reveals key differences in performance and cost. Pinecone acknowledges Postgres' ease of use but criticizes its quality, citing issues with index size predictability, resource intensity, and filtering performance. In response, Postgres demonstrates superior performance with additional tweaks, achieving 90% recall with under 200ms latency. Postgres addresses metadata filtering by creating specialized indexes for each metadata value, enhancing search accuracy. Additionally, Postgres overcomes slow index builds by offloading processes to environments with ample resources, improving indexing speeds significantly. The predictability of index sizes in Postgres is highlighted, contrasting Pinecone's concerns. Cost comparisons show Postgres as a cost-effective option for high query loads, especially with providers offering free tiers and budget-friendly options. Postgres offers transparency, control over performance tuning, and features like inline embedding generation, making it a versatile choice for various workloads. Despite the need for additional code in Postgres, it provides flexibility and control over performance optimizations, making it a compelling option for users seeking customization and efficiency.

Link Icon 9 comments
By @beoberha - 3 months
Vector dbs are quickly becoming a commodity. This was not true when pinecone was founded and received its first few rounds of funding.

At this point, Postgres has clearly caught up and the VCs are going to do everything it takes to hold on.

By @cellis - 3 months
Wow this should be getting a lot more love. I wonder if you could do a breakdown vs Qdrant?
By @Rapzid - 3 months
I wonder how much index creation degrades if the storage were 4th gen NVMe drives vs other other, more typical storage technologies.
By @elijahbenizzy - 3 months
The venn diagram of "problems that people have" and "problems that postgres solves" is closer to a circle than many would like to admit.
By @hdhshdhshdjd - 3 months
Indexing in Postgres is legitimately painful, I don’t think “get moar ram” is a good response to that particular critique.
By @esafak - 3 months
How does it compare with LanceDB, and what's interesting about lantern technically?
By @Labo333 - 3 months