HOW PINECONE SERVERLESS IS BETTER THAN A PROVISIONED VECTOR DATABASE?
Sarfraz Nawaz
Agentic Process Automation | AI Agents | CxO Advisory | Angel Investor
Machine learning models understand our world through vectors. Unlike humans who perceive data through images, audio, text, and documents, machine learning models decode the world through a long list of numbers that we call vectors.
Now when you are building and deploying a machine learning model, you will have to deal with millions and millions of high dimensional vectors. You will have to manipulate, store, process, and retrieve these vectors for your ML model to generate desired results.
What businesses do is that they use existing infrastructure and open-source frameworks to do what they are not built to – store and manage vectors.
This ends up with businesses building huge infrastructures, putting in a lot of resources, and getting unsatisfactory results.
Pinecone Serverless addresses this issue by offering a cloud-based, cheaper, and more efficient vector database solution. Unlike provisioned vector databases, the serverless architecture separates reads, writes, and storage, reducing costs by 50%. Plus, it provides more accurate, fresh, filtered, and better context-relevant results as compared to other vector databases.
Here are the 5 key reasons why you should consider Pinecone serverless for building AI chatbots, LLM-based apps, AI apps, or other machine learning projects.
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5 Reasons Why Pinecone Serverless Is A Better Choice
1.Lowers cost by 50%
Storing and searching through vast amounts of vector data on-demand can be excessively costly, even with a specialized vector database, and nearly impossible using relational or NoSQL databases.
Pinecone's serverless solution tackles this challenge by enabling you to incorporate virtually limitless knowledge into your GenAI applications at a fraction of the cost, up to 50 times cheaper than Pinecone's pod-based indexes.
This remarkable affordability is made possible by pioneer serverless architecture, which introduces several groundbreaking innovations:
1. Memory-efficient retrieval: The innovative serverless architecture transcends conventional scatter-gather query mechanisms, ensuring that only the essential segments of the index are loaded into memory from blob storage.
2. Intelligent query planning: The retrieval algorithm meticulously scans only the pertinent data segments required for each query, bypassing the need to scan the entire index. (Pro tip: Optimize query efficiency by organizing your records into namespaces or indexes for faster, more cost-effective queries.)
3. Separation of storage and compute: The pricing model distinguishes between reads (queries), writes, and storage. This separation allows you to 1) avoid paying for compute resources during idle periods and 2) pay solely for the storage utilized, irrespective of your query requirements.
2.No worry about configuring or managing index
Pinecone serverless streamlines the process of initiation and expansion. With its fully serverless architecture, you're relieved of the burden of database management and scaling considerations.
Gone are the days of configuring pods or replicas, or dealing with resource sharding and provisioning. All you need to do is assign a name to your index, upload your data, and commence querying through either the API or the client.
Moreover, the revamped API acts as a unified endpoint for managing all index operations seamlessly across your various environments. This centralized control simplifies the management of your Pinecone serverless setup, enhancing efficiency and ease of use.
3.Make applications more knowledgeable
Relevant results make outstanding applications. And context-relevant results hinge on the availability of extensive data or knowledge within your vector database.
Research into the effects of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) underscores this point, demonstrating that increased data coverage leads to more accurate and faithful results.
Even with datasets scaling up to billions of entries, performance benefits from incorporating all available data, regardless of the specific Large Language Model (LLM) utilized (source).
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To empower developers in crafting highly informed GenAI applications, a robust vector database capable of efficiently searching through vast and continually expanding datasets is essential.
Pinecone serverless offers precisely this capability, enabling companies to seamlessly integrate practically limitless knowledge into their applications.
Furthermore, Pinecone serverless boasts features such as support for namespaces, live index updates, metadata filtering, and hybrid search. These functionalities ensure that users obtain the most pertinent results, irrespective of the nature or scale of their workload.
4.Easily integrate your tools
Pinecone has collaborated with leading GenAI solutions to deliver the most user-friendly serverless experience available.
Pinecone Serverless has partnered with top tech companies to give you access to top-notch tools and seamlessly adopt serverless technology:
1.??? Anyscale: Generate embeddings at a mere 10% of the cost compared to other popular offerings, leveraging Anyscale's efficient solutions.
2.??? Cohere: Scale your semantic search systems effortlessly by combining Pinecone serverless with Cohere's Embed Jobs.
3.??? Confluent: Transform the concept of real-time, cost-effective GenAI into reality with Confluent's Pinecone Sink Connector.
4.??? Langchain: Develop and deploy RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) applications with ease using Pinecone serverless in conjunction with Langchain's LangServe and LangSmith solutions.
5.??? Pulumi: Simplify the maintenance, management, and reproducibility of infrastructure through Pulumi's Pinecone Provider, facilitating infrastructure as code practices.
6.??? Vercel: Witness how RAG chatbots leverage Pinecone serverless and Vercel's AI SDK to demonstrate functionalities such as URL crawling, data chunking, embedding, and semantic questioning.
By leveraging the capabilities of these esteemed partners, Pinecone ensures that users can effortlessly harness the power of serverless technology for their GenAI applications, paving the way for enhanced efficiency and innovation.
5.Get fast, fresh, and relevant vector search results
While cost savings often raise concerns about potential trade-offs in functionality, accuracy, or performance, Pinecone serverless proves otherwise.
Similar to pod-based indexes, Pinecone serverless offers robust support for essential features such as live index updates, metadata filtering, hybrid search, and namespaces. This ensures that users retain maximum control over their data, regardless of the chosen deployment method.
Furthermore, performance remains uncompromised. In fact, serverless indexes exhibit significantly lower latencies compared to pod-based indexes for warm namespaces, while maintaining a comparable level of recall.
Warm namespaces, which regularly receive queries and are cached locally in multi-tenant workers, enjoy enhanced efficiency. However, it's worth noting that cold-start queries may experience slightly higher latencies initially.
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Pinecone serverless is the innovative technology that is going to change how we handle vectors for building Gen AI applications.
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