Compression
Uncompressed vectors can be large. Compressed vectors lose some information, but they use fewer resources and can be very cost effective.
Vector quantization
To balance resource costs and system performance, consider one of these options:
- Rotational Quantization (RQ) (recommended)
- Product Quantization (PQ)
- Binary Quantization (BQ)
- Scalar Quantization (SQ)
You can also disable quantization for a collection.
Compression by Default
Starting with v1.33, Weaviate enables 8-bit RQ quantization by default when creating new collections to ensure efficient resource utilization and faster performance. This behavior can be changed through the DEFAULT_QUANTIZATION environment variable. Note that once enabled, quantization can't be disabled for a collection.
Multi-vector encoding
Aside from quantization, Weaviate also offers encodings for multi-vector embeddings: