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Will Amazon S3 Vectors kill vector databases or save them?

(zilliz.com)
276 points Fendy | 1 comments | 08 Sep 25 15:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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janalsncm ◴[08 Sep 25 19:09 UTC] No.45172507[source]▶
S3 vectors has a topK limit of 30, and if you add filters it may be less than that. So if you need something with higher topK you’ll need to 1) look elsewhere or 2) shard your dataset into N shards to get NxK results, which you query in parallel and merge afterwards.

I also didn’t see any latency info on their docs page https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_S3Vector...

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mediaman ◴[08 Sep 25 21:02 UTC] No.45173951[source]▶
And a topk of 30 also means reranking of any sort is out, except for maybe limited reranking of 30->10, but that seems kind of pointless with today’s LLMs that can handle a bit more context.
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1. janalsncm ◴[08 Sep 25 22:06 UTC] No.45174652[source]▶
Yeah exactly, so you could do something like shard by the first 4 bits of md5 of the text (gives you 16 buckets) but now you’re adding extra complexity to work around their limitations.