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Are vector databases (mostly) commodities ? Do they have a winner takes all property (Pinecone seems more popular at the moment?

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Everytime I see pinecone I'm immediately put off by it since it's so heavily focused on "use the cloud" and "make an account". I don't want another account, I don't want to have to be connected to the internet, and I don't even really want multiple files to be generated on disk.

Simple is better and offline is better, which is why SQLite and DuckDB reign supreme.

So, no Pinecone is not a very good DB from what I can tell.

I agree -- I listened to a 2022 podcast interview with the cofounder of Pinecone and he seems very dismissive of what open source can bring to vector database. I found that annoying and off putting. The open source vector database ecosystem is really impressive right now!

But is isn’t open source.

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