This little thread helps solidify my opinions towards using only the few in the small section they point out, being Qdrant, chroma, or weaviate. The fact that someone who works at pinecone didn't take the time to read an article in their field, decided to comment anyway, and then stated they didn't know what serverless or embedded may mean with regard to databases pretty much sums up the state of many vector databases, especially pubecone imo.

I don't even really love Qdrant or chroma (haven't tried weaviate, but it's at least in the right region according to the article), but at least they are embedded.

I pretty much refuse to use any DB that requires using API keys, putting data off premises, and even if it requires setting up ACL. I don't even use postgres much for the complex ACL and having to set up ports reason.

SQLite and DuckDB are truly incredible, can store gigantic databases (>2TB is still perfectly quite performant) and you can just hand any collaborator the entire DB on a disk, without having to worry about complex password junk.

I have to agree here - including pinecone in the images of major competitors but doing absolutely no analysis of the product is bizarre. I would expect almost everyone would come into the article aware of pinecone and pg_vector, and often just at a “it’s a leading vector database but that’s all I know” level. It leaves a giant question mark in my mind of how pinecone fits into the space of competitors. It’s absence (beyond an image with its name called out) is baffling.

I am also a bit surprised at the hostility to the pinecone employee here. I see a bunch of other companies and projects jumping in and everything is cool. But for some reason the pinecone dude catches a lot of grief.

What’s going on? Is there some weird toxic subculture in the vector database space that’s got it’s knives kit for pinecone for some reason?

Just ctrl-f "pinecone" and got nothing.

edit: pinecone is mentioned in the earlier parts of the blog series, though.