July 18, 2024 Narek Galstyan writes:
We were naturally curious when we saw Pinecone’s blog post comparing Postgres and Pinecone.
In their post on Postgres, Pinecone recognizes that Postgres is easy to start with as a vector database, since most developers are familiar with it. However, they argue that Postgres falls short in terms of quality. They describe issues with index size predictability, index creation resource intensity, metadata filtering performance, and cost.
This is a response to Pinecone’s blog post, where we show that Postgres outperforms Pinecone in the same benchmarks with a few additional tweaks. We show that with just 20 lines of additional code, Postgres with the pgvector or lantern extension outperforms Pinecone by reaching 90% recall (compared to Pinecone’s 60%) with under 200ms p95 latency.