Changing distance metrics

By default, Pinecone indexes using the cosine similarity distance metric to compute similarity scores between vectors, which are used when querying to find the most similar vectors. Pinecone also supports other distance metrics, including Euclidean distance and the dot product.

The distance metric is set when the index is created, and can't be changed afterwards. In this exercise, you'll practice creating an index that uses the dot product distance metric.

This exercise is part of the course

Vector Databases for Embeddings with Pinecone

Exercise instructions

Initialize the Pinecone connection with your API key.
Create a new index called "dotproduct-index" that uses the dot product distance metric.
List your indexes to verify that it has been created and has the correct metric.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Initialize the Pinecone client with your API key
pc = Pinecone(api_key="____")

# Create an index that uses the dot product distance metric
pc.create_index(
    name="____",
    dimension=1536,
    ____,
    spec=ServerlessSpec(
        cloud='aws',
        region='us-east-1'
    )
)

# Print a list of your indexes
print(____)

Edit and Run Code

This exercise is part of the course

Vector Databases for Embeddings with Pinecone

IntermediateSkill Level

4.8+

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Explore the mechanics behind Pinecone's vector database, from pods and indexes to comparing it with other databases. Learn to differentiate pod types, acquire API keys, and initialise Pinecone connection using python. Finally, you’ll learn how to create Pinecone indexes, exploring different parameters such as dimensionality, distance metrics, pod types, and others.

Exercise 1: Introduction to Pinecone indexes Exercise 2: Creating a Pinecone client Exercise 3: Your first Pinecone index Exercise 4: Managing indexes Exercise 5: Connecting to an index Exercise 6: Deleting an index Exercise 7: The Pinecone ecosystem Exercise 8: Vector ingestion Exercise 9: Checking dimensionality Exercise 10: Ingesting vectors with metadata

Get hands-on with Pinecone in Python, where we explore the practical side of using Pinecone for managing indexes, adding vectors with metadata, searching and retrieving vectors, and making updates or deletions. Gain a solid grasp of the key functions and ideas to smoothly handle data in the Pinecone vector database.

Exercise 1: Retrieving vectors Exercise 2: Querying vs. fetching Exercise 3: Fetching vectors Exercise 4: Querying vectors Exercise 5: Returning the most similar vectors Exercise 6: Changing distance metrics

Current Exercise

Exercise 7: Metadata filtering Exercise 8: Filtering queries Exercise 9: Multiple metadata filters Exercise 10: Updating and deleting vectors Exercise 11: Updating vector values Exercise 12: Updating vector metadata Exercise 13: Deleting vectors

In this chapter, learners delve into optimizing Pinecone index performance, leveraging multi-tenant namespaces for cost reduction, building semantic search engines, and creating retrieval-augmented question answering systems using Pinecone with the OpenAI API. Through these lessons, learners gain practical skills in performance tuning, semantic search, and retrieval-augmented question answering, empowering them to apply Pinecone effectively in real-world AI applications.

Exercise 1: Batching upserts Exercise 2: Defining a function for chunking Exercise 3: Batching upserts in chunks Exercise 4: Batching upserts in parallel Exercise 5: Multitenancy and namespaces Exercise 6: Namespaces Exercise 7: Querying namespaces Exercise 8: Semantic search with Pinecone Exercise 9: Creating and configuring a Pinecone index Exercise 10: Upserting vectors for semantic search Exercise 11: Querying vectors for semantic search Exercise 12: RAG chatbot with Pinecone and OpenAI Exercise 13: Upserting YouTube transcripts Exercise 14: Building a retrieval function Exercise 15: RAG questions answering function Exercise 16: Congratulations!