7 Years, 2 Rebuilds, 40K+ Stars: Milvus Recap and Roadmap

[pietz]

It seems to me like many developers are moving from native vector stores back to Postgres with pgvector. It's easier to integrate, cheaper to set up, familiar to work with, oftentimes faster, while not hitting any limitations for most projects. My vector store recommendation boils down to: "Use pgvector unless you have specific reason not to".

Does this still hold?

[codingjaguar]

well it's apples and oranges. Why do people buy F150 instead of fitting things into the trunk of a Corolla? cuz they got a lot of stuff.

For people who run thousands of QPS on billions of vectors, Milvus is a solid choice. For someone playing with a twitter demo with a few thousand vectors, any vector db can do the job well. In fact there is a fun project Milvus Lite designed for that case :)

I've seen many builders migrate from pgvector to Milvus as their apps scale. But perhaps they wish they had considered scalability earlier.

(I'm from Milvus so i could be biased.)

[gardnr]

pgVector is great and so is FAISS, but those are just a subset of what you get from Milvus. If all you need to do is RAG over 50Mb of documents then pick the right tool for the job. I use Chroma for a lot of projects.

Then, what if you want hybrid search, or different IVF variants, or disk-based search, or horizontal scaling, or something that leverages SIMD, or sparse vectors? Milvus is great.

[leo_e]

I think they are for different scales and scenario complexities.

[notachatbot123]

> Milvus is an open-source vector database built for GenAI applications.

[LuminaWang7]

Milvus is the most popular vector database in the world.

[ramon156]

Does it hold any value when it comes from the "Developer Advocate @ Milvus"

Like others have already said, pgvector is used a lot as well