FAISS vs. TiDB
Compare FAISS vs. TiDB by the following set of capabilities. We want you to choose the best database for you, even if it’s not us.
FAISS vs. TiDB on Scalability
No. Can not scale beyond single node.
Yes.
No distributed data replacement
Both
FAISS scalability
Without any distributed data replacement, FAISS is not able to scale beyond a single node
TiDB
TiDB is designed with scalability as one of its core features. It offers both horizontal and vertical scaling capabilities to handle growing workloads and data volumes.
FAISS vs. TiDB on Functionality
Performance is the biggest challenge with vector databases as the number of unstructured data elements stored in a vector database grows into hundreds of millions or billions, and horizontal scaling across multiple nodes becomes paramount.
Yes, vector search & SQL search
FLAT, IVS_FLAT, IVF_SQ8, IVF_PQ, HNSW, BIN_FLAT and BIN_IVF_FLAT
HNSW
No. HNSW only
FAISS functionality
FAISS is an algorithm to support kNN search.
TiDB
TiDB offers vector search through its serverless cluster and supports vectors with a maximum dimension of 16,000. The Vector data type in TiDB is designed to store single-precision floating-point numbers (Float32). It only supports cosine distance and L2 distance for similarity measurement.
FAISS vs. TiDB on Purpose-built
What’s your vector database for?
A vector database is a fully managed solution for storing, indexing, and searching across a massive dataset of unstructured data that leverages the power of embeddings from machine learning models. A vector database should have the following features:
- Scalability and tunability
- Multi-tenancy and data isolation
- A complete suite of APIs
- An intuitive user interface/administrative console
No, vector search is an add-on to TiDB Cloud serverless.
Python, JavaScript
No. TiDB does not provide specific SDKs. Instead, it is designed to be compatible with MySQL, which means TiDB can be used with any language with MySQL client or driver support.
FAISS vs. TiDB: what’s right for me?
FAISS
Faiss is a powerful library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors, with GPU-accelerated algorithms and Python wrappers, developed at FAIR, the fundamental AI research team at Meta License: MIT license
TiDB
TiDB is an open-source distributed SQL database for OLAP and OLTP workloads. It now offers a vector search capability (in public beta) as an add-on to its SaaS solution, TiDB Cloud Serverless.
Apache 2.0