pgvecto.rs is a Postgres extension that provides vector similarity search functions. It is written in Rust and based on pgrx. It is currently ⚠️under heavy development⚠️, please take care when using it in production. Read more at 📝our launch blog.

• 💃 Easy to use: pgvecto.rs is a Postgres extension, which means that you can use it directly within your existing database. This makes it easy to integrate into your existing workflows and applications.
• 🦀 Rewrite in Rust: Rewriting in Rust offers benefits such as improved memory safety, better performance, and reduced maintenance costs over time.
• 🙋 Community: People loves Rust We are happy to help you with any questions you may have. You could join our Discord to get in touch with us.

sudo apt install -y build-essential libpq-dev libssl-dev pkg-config gcc libreadline-dev flex bison libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libxml2-utils xsltproc zlib1g-dev ccache clang git
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

git clone https://github.com/tensorchord/pgvecto.rs.git
cd pgvecto.rs

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt $(lsb_release -cs)-pgdg main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list'
wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install libpq-dev postgresql-15 postgresql-server-dev-15
cargo install cargo-pgrx --git https://github.com/tensorchord/pgrx.git --rev $(cat Cargo.toml | grep "pgrx =" | awk -F'rev = "' '{print $2}' | cut -d'"' -f1)
cargo pgrx init --pg15=/usr/lib/postgresql/15/bin/pg_config

cargo pgrx install --release

Configure your PostgreSQL by modifying the shared_preload_libraries to include vectors.so.

psql -U postgres -c 'ALTER SYSTEM SET shared_preload_libraries = "vectors.so"'

You need restart the PostgreSQL cluster.

sudo systemctl restart postgresql.service

Connect to the database and enable the extension.

DROP EXTENSION IF EXISTS vectors;
CREATE EXTENSION vectors;

pgvecto.rs allows columns of a table to be defined as vectors.

The data type vector(n) denotes an n-dimensional vector. The n within the brackets signifies the dimensions of the vector. For instance, vector(1000) would represent a vector with 1000 dimensions, so you could create a table like this.

-- create table with a vector column

CREATE TABLE items (
  id bigserial PRIMARY KEY,
  embedding vector(3) NOT NULL
);

You can then populate the table with vector data as follows.

-- insert values

INSERT INTO items (embedding)
VALUES ('[1,2,3]'), ('[4,5,6]');

-- or insert values using a casting from array to vector

INSERT INTO items (embedding)
VALUES (ARRAY[1, 2, 3]::real[]), (ARRAY[4, 5, 6]::real[]);

We support three operators to calculate the distance between two vectors.

• <->: squared Euclidean distance, defined as $\Sigma (x_i - y_i) ^ 2$.
• <#>: negative dot product distance, defined as $- \Sigma x_iy_i$.
• <=>: negative cosine distance, defined as $- \frac{\Sigma x_iy_i}{\sqrt{\Sigma x_i^2 \Sigma y_i^2}}$.

-- call the distance function through operators

-- squared Euclidean distance
SELECT '[1, 2, 3]' <-> '[3, 2, 1]';
-- negative dot product distance
SELECT '[1, 2, 3]' <#> '[3, 2, 1]';
-- negative square cosine distance
SELECT '[1, 2, 3]' <=> '[3, 2, 1]';

You can search for a vector simply like this.

-- query the similar embeddings
SELECT * FROM items ORDER BY embedding <-> '[3,2,1]' LIMIT 5;
-- query the neighbors within a certain distance
SELECT * FROM items WHERE embedding <-> '[3,2,1]' < 5;

You can create an index, using squared Euclidean distance with the following SQL.

-- Using HNSW algorithm.

CREATE INDEX ON items USING vectors (embedding l2_ops)
WITH (options = $$
capacity = 2097152
[vectors]
memmap = "ram"
[algorithm.hnsw]
memmap = "ram"
$$);

--- Or using IVFFlat algorithm.

CREATE INDEX ON items USING vectors (embedding l2_ops)
WITH (options = $$
capacity = 2097152
[vectors]
memmap = "ram"
[algorithm.ivf]
memmap = "ram"
nlist = 1000
nprobe = 10
$$);

Now you can perform a KNN search with the following SQL simply.

SELECT *, embedding <-> '[0, 0, 0]' AS score
FROM items
ORDER BY embedding <-> '[0, 0, 0]' LIMIT 10;

Please note, vector indexes are not loaded by default when PostgreSQL restarts. To load or unload the index, you can use vectors_load and vectors_unload.

--- get the index name
\d items

-- load the index
SELECT vectors_load('items_embedding_idx'::regclass);

We planning to support more index types (issue here).

Welcome to contribute if you are also interested!

vector and vector(n) are all legal data types, where n denotes dimensions of a vector.

The current implementation ignores dimensions of a vector, i.e., the behavior is the same as for vectors of unspecified dimensions.

There is only one exception: indexes cannot be created on columns without specified dimensions.

We utilize TOML syntax to express the index's configuration. Here's what each key in the configuration signifies:

Imagine this, your existing data is stored in a Postgres database, and you want to use a vector database to do some vector similarity search. You have to move your data from Postgres to the vector database, and you have to maintain two databases at the same time. This is not a good idea.

Why not just use Postgres to do the vector similarity search? This is the reason why we build pgvecto.rs. The user journey is like this:

-- Update the embedding column for the documents table
UPDATE documents SET embedding = ai_embedding_vector(content) WHERE length(embedding) = 0;

-- Create an index on the embedding column
CREATE INDEX ON documents USING vectors (embedding l2_ops)
WITH (options = $$
capacity = 2097152
[vectors]
memmap = "ram"
[algorithm.hnsw]
memmap = "ram"
m = 32
ef = 256
$$);

-- Query the similar embeddings
SELECT * FROM documents ORDER BY embedding <-> ai_embedding_vector('hello world') LIMIT 5;

From SingleStore DB Blog:

Vectors and vector search are a data type and query processing approach, not a foundation for a new way of processing data. Using a specialty vector database (SVDB) will lead to the usual problems we see (and solve) again and again with our customers who use multiple specialty systems: redundant data, excessive data movement, lack of agreement on data values among distributed components, extra labor expense for specialized skills, extra licensing costs, limited query language power, programmability and extensibility, limited tool integration, and poor data integrity and availability compared with a true DBMS.

You could use envd to set up the development environment with one command. It will create a docker container and install all the dependencies for you.

pip install envd
envd up

We need your help! Please check out the issues.

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

Alex Chi 💻	Ben Ye 📖	Ce Gao 💼 🖋 📖	Jinjing Zhou 🎨 🤔 📆	Keming 🐛 💻 📖 🤔 🚇	Usamoi 💻 🤔	odysa 📖 💻
yihong 💻
Add your contributions

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!

Thanks to the following projects:

• pgrx - Postgres extension framework in Rust
• pgvector - Postgres extension for vector similarity search written in C