Vector Databases Compared: pgvector, Qdrant, Pinecone, Weaviate
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Comprehensive comparison of vector databases for RAG, highly actionable and directly relevant to AI/ML and data engineering.
Pgvector, Qdrant, Pinecone, and Weaviate all use HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) for approximate nearest neighbor search, trading a small recall loss for logarithmic query scaling. The key differentiator is their filtering performance: pgvector's post-filtering degrades with selective filters, while Qdrant and Weaviate pre-filter during graph traversal, and Pinecone's serverless architecture abstracts scaling but limits tuning. Choosing the right one depends on your specific vector count, filter selectivity, and recall requirements, not generic benchmarks.