Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

feat: Add doc for binary vector #52

Merged
merged 2 commits into from
Mar 5, 2024
Merged
Show file tree
Hide file tree
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions .vitepress/config.mts
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -66,6 +66,7 @@ export default defineConfig({
items: [
{ text: 'Indexing', link: '/usage/indexing' },
{ text: 'Search', link: '/usage/search' },
{ text: 'Vector Types', link: '/usage/vector-types' },
{ text: 'Monitoring', link: '/usage/monitoring' },
{ text: 'Quantization', link: '/usage/quantization' },
{ text: 'Compatibility', link: '/usage/compatibility' },
Expand Down
Binary file added src/usage/images/bvector.png
Loading
Sorry, something went wrong. Reload?
Sorry, we cannot display this file.
Sorry, this file is invalid so it cannot be displayed.
47 changes: 47 additions & 0 deletions src/usage/vector-types.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
# Vector Types

We have seen `vector` type in the previous section. In this section, we will show other vector types.

## `bvector` binary vector

The `bvector` type is a binary vector type in pgvecto.rs. It represents a binary vector, which is a vector where each component can take on two possible values, typically 0 and 1.

Here's an example of creating a table with a bvector column and inserting values:

```sql {3}
CREATE TABLE items (
id bigserial PRIMARY KEY,
embedding bvector(3) NOT NULL
);

INSERT INTO items (embedding) VALUES ('[1,0,1]'), ('[0,1,0]');
```

We support three operators to calculate the distance between two `bvector` values.

- `<->` (`bvector_l2_ops`): squared Euclidean distance, defined as $\Sigma (x_i - y_i) ^ 2$. The Hamming distance is equivalent to the squared Euclidean distance for binary vectors.
- `<#>` (`bvector_dot_ops`): negative dot product, defined as $- \Sigma x_iy_i$.
- `<=>` (`bvector_cos_ops`): cosine distance, defined as $1 - \frac{\Sigma x_iy_i}{\sqrt{\Sigma x_i^2 \Sigma y_i^2}}$.
- `<~>` (`bvector_jaccard_ops`): Jaccard distance, defined as $1 - \frac{|X\cap Y|}{|X\cup Y|}$.

```sql

Index can be created on `bvector` type as well.

```sql
CREATE INDEX bvector ON items USING vectors (embedding bvector_l2_ops);

SELECT * FROM items ORDER BY embedding <-> '[1,0,1]' LIMIT 5;
```

### Performance

The `bvector` type is optimized for storage and performance. It uses a bit-packed representation to store the binary vector. The distance calculation is also optimized for binary vectors.

Here are some performance benchmarks for the `bvector` type. We use the [dbpedia-entities-openai3-text-embedding-3-large-3072-1M](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Qdrant/dbpedia-entities-openai3-text-embedding-3-large-3072-1M) dataset for the benchmark. The VM is n2-standard-8 (8 vCPUs, 32 GB memory) on Google Cloud.

We upsert 1M binary vectors into the table and then run a KNN query for each embedding. It only takes about 600MB memory to index 1M binary vectors.

![bvector](./images/bvector.png)

We can see that the `bvector`'s accuracy is not as good as the `vector` type, but it exceeds 95% if we adopt adaptive retrieval.