The initial v0.1.0 release will only have linear scans, but I want to support ANN indexes like IVF/HNSW in the future! Wanted to focus on fullscans first to make things easier.
In my experiments you can get pretty far with linear scans using sqlite-vec. Depends on the number of dimensions of course, but I'd expect it can handle searching 100's of thousands of vectors to maybe a million with sub-second searches, especially if you tweak some settings (page_size, mmap_size, etc.). And if you quantize your vectors (int8 reduces size 4x, binary 32x) you can get even faster, at the expense of quality. Or use Matryoshka embeddings[0] to shave down dimensions even more.
Building sql.js-httpvfs would be cool! Though I'm using the "official" SQLite WASM builds which came out after sql.js, so I don't think it'll be compatible out of the box. Would be very curious to see how much effort it would be to make a new HTTP VFS for SQLite's new WASM builds
Thanks for sharing! I've looked into usearch before, it's really sleek, especially all their language bindings. Though I want sqlite-vec to have total control over what stays in-memory vs on-disk during searches, and most vector search libraries like usearch/hnswlib/faiss/annoy either always store in-memory or don't offer hooks for other storage systems.
Additionally, sqlite-vec takes advantage of some SQLite specific APIs, like BLOB I/O [0], which I hope would speed things up a ton. It's a ton more work, coming up with new storage solutions that are backed by SQLite shadow tables, but I think it'll be work it!
And I also like how sqlite-vec is just a single sqlite-vec.c file. It makes linking + cross-compiling super easy, and since I got burned relying on heavy C++ dependencies with sqlite-vss, a no-dependency rule feels good. Mostly inspired by SQLite single-file sqlite3.c amalgamation, and Josh Baker's single file C projects like tg[1].
You are right. I don't yet support pluggable storage systems, but you can check the Lantern's fork of USearch. It may have the right capabilities, as they wanted the same level of integration for Postgres.
Our current SQLite extension brings "search APIs" to SQLite but not the index itself. Think of it as a bundle of SIMD-vectorized Cosine/Dot/L2/Hamming/Jaccard... (for vectors) and Levenshtein/Hamming/NW (for text) distances coming from SimSIMD and StringZilla. Unlike USearch, the latter are pure C 99 header-only libraries, in case you need smth similar.
In my experiments you can get pretty far with linear scans using sqlite-vec. Depends on the number of dimensions of course, but I'd expect it can handle searching 100's of thousands of vectors to maybe a million with sub-second searches, especially if you tweak some settings (page_size, mmap_size, etc.). And if you quantize your vectors (int8 reduces size 4x, binary 32x) you can get even faster, at the expense of quality. Or use Matryoshka embeddings[0] to shave down dimensions even more.
Building sql.js-httpvfs would be cool! Though I'm using the "official" SQLite WASM builds which came out after sql.js, so I don't think it'll be compatible out of the box. Would be very curious to see how much effort it would be to make a new HTTP VFS for SQLite's new WASM builds
[0] https://huggingface.co/blog/matryoshka