Vector embedding at the app tier & orchestration / compute tier make more sense for managing the dependency than the vector DB tier for the bulk of ML/AI projects I've worked on. Round tripping through the vectordb would be an architectural, code, and perf headache. Ex: Just one of the many ways we use embeddings is as part of prefiltering what goes into the DB, running in a bulk pipeline in a diff VPC, and in a way we dont want to interfere with DB utilization.
We generally avoid using embedding services to beginwith.. outside calls is the special case. Imagine something heavy like video transcription via Google APIs, not the typical one of 'just' text embedding. The actual embedding is generally one step of broader data wrangling, so there needs to be a good reason for doing something heavy and outside our control... Which has been rare.
Doing in the DB tier is nice for tiny projects, simplifying occasional business logic, etc, but generally it's not a big deal for us to run encode(str) when building a DB query.
Where DB embedding support gets more interesting to me here is layering on additional representation changes on top, like IVF+PQ... But that can be done after afaict? (And supporting raw vectors generically here, vs having to align our python & model deps to our DB's, is a big feature)
We generally avoid using embedding services to beginwith.. outside calls is the special case. Imagine something heavy like video transcription via Google APIs, not the typical one of 'just' text embedding. The actual embedding is generally one step of broader data wrangling, so there needs to be a good reason for doing something heavy and outside our control... Which has been rare.
Doing in the DB tier is nice for tiny projects, simplifying occasional business logic, etc, but generally it's not a big deal for us to run encode(str) when building a DB query.
Where DB embedding support gets more interesting to me here is layering on additional representation changes on top, like IVF+PQ... But that can be done after afaict? (And supporting raw vectors generically here, vs having to align our python & model deps to our DB's, is a big feature)