Run Milvus Lite Locally
This page illustrates how to run Milvus Lite locally for development and testing purposes.
Overview
Milvus Lite is the lightweight version of Milvus, an open-source vector database that powers AI applications with vector embeddings and similarity search.
Milvus Lite can be imported into your Python application, providing the core vector search functionality of Milvus. Milvus Lite is included in the Python SDK of Milvus, thus it can be simply deployed with pip install pymilvus. This repo contains the core components of Milvus Lite.
Milvus Lite shares the same API and covers most of the features of Milvus. Together, they provide a consistent user experience across different types of environments, fitting use cases of different size. With the same client-side code, you can run a quick demo of less than a million vectors with Milvus Lite, or a small scale app with Milvus Docker container hosted on a single machine, and eventually to a large scale production deployment on Kubenetes serving billions of vectors at thousands of QPS.
Prerequisites
Milvus Lite supports the following OS distributions and sillicon types:
- Ubuntu >= 20.04 (x86_64)
- MacOS >= 11.0 (Apple Silicon and x86_64)
Please note that Milvus Lite is good for getting started with vector search or building demos and prototypes. For a production use case, we recommend using Milvus on Docker and Kubenetes, or considering the fully-managed Milvus on Zilliz Cloud.
Set up Milvus Lite
Milvus Lite has been packed along with pymilvus, the Python SDK library of Milvus. To set up Milvus Lite, run the following command in the terminal.
pip install "pymilvus>=2.4.2"
Connect to Milvus Lite
You can connect to Milvus Lite as follows.
from pymilvus import MilvusClient
client = MilvusClient("milvus_demo.db")
After running the above code snippet, a database file named milvus_demo.db will be generated in the current folder.
Limits
When running Milvus Lite, note that some features are not supported. The following tables summarize the usage limits on Milvus Lite.
Collection
| Method / Parameter | Supported in Milvus Lite |
|---|---|
| create_collection() | Support with limited parameters |
collection_name | Y |
dimension | Y |
primary_field_name | Y |
id_type | Y |
vector_field_name | Y |
metric_type | Y |
auto_id | Y |
schema | Y |
index_params | Y |
enable_dynamic_field | Y |
num_shards | N |
partition_key_field | N |
num_partitions | N |
consistency_level | N (Only supports Strong; Any configuration will be treated as Strong.) |
| get_collection_stats() | Supports getting collection statistics. |
collection_name | Y |
timeout | Y |
| describe_collection() | num_shards, consistency_level, and collection_id in response are invalid. |
timeout | Y |
| has_collection() | Supports checking if a collection exists. |
collection_name | Y |
timeout | Y |
| list_collections() | Supports listing all collections. |
| drop_collection() | Supports dropping a collection. |
collection_name | Y |
timeout | Y |
| rename_collection() | Renaming a collection is not supported. |
Field & Schema
| Method / Parameter | Supported in Milvus Lite |
|---|---|
| create_schema() | Support with limited parameters |
auto_id | Y |
enable_dynamic_field | Y |
primary_field | Y |
partition_key_field | N |
| add_field() | Support with limited parameters |
field_name | Y |
datatype | Y |
is_primary | Y |
max_length | Y |
element_type | Y |
max_capacity | Y |
dim | Y |
is_partition_key | N |
Insert & Search
| Method / Parameter | Supported in Milvus Lite |
|---|---|
| search() | Support with limited parameters |
collection_name | Y |
data | Y |
filter | Y |
limit | Y |
output_fields | Y |
search_params | Y |
timeout | Y |
partition_names | N |
anns_field | Y |
| query() | Support with limited parameters |
collection_name | Y |
filter | Y |
output_fields | Y |
timeout | Y |
ids | Y |
partition_names | N |
| get() | Support with limited parameters |
collection_name | Y |
ids | Y |
output_fields | Y |
timeout | Y |
partition_names | N |
| delete() | Support with limited parameters |
collection_name | Y |
ids | Y |
timeout | Y |
filter | Y |
partition_name | N |
| insert() | Support with limited parameters |
collection_name | Y |
data | Y |
timeout | Y |
partition_name | N |
| upsert() | Support with limited parameters |
collection_name | Y |
data | Y |
timeout | Y |
partition_name | N |
Load & Release
| Method / Parameter | Supported in Milvus Lite |
|---|---|
| load_collection() | Y |
collection_name | Y |
timeout | Y |
| release_collection() | Y |
collection_name | Y |
timeout | Y |
| get_load_state() | Getting load status is not supported. |
| refresh_load() | Loading the unloaded data of a loaded collection is not supported. |
| close() | Y |
Index
| Method / Parameter | Supported in Milvus Lite |
|---|---|
| list_indexes() | Listing indexes is supported. |
collection_name | Y |
field_name | Y |
| create_index() | Only supports partial index types: FLAT, HNSW, BIN_FLAT, SPARSE_INVERTED_INDEX, SPARSE_WAND. |
index_params | Y |
timeout | Y |
| drop_index() | Dropping indexes is supported. |
collection_name | Y |
index_name | Y |
timeout | Y |
| describe_index() | Describing indexes is supported. |
collection_name | Y |
index_name | Y |
timeout | Y |
Partition
Milvus Lite does not support partitions and partition-related methods.
Users & Roles
Milvus Lite does not support users and roles and related methods.
Alias
Milvus Lite does not support aliases and alias-related methods.
Others
For other methods not listed in the above tables, Milvus Lite does not support them.
What's next
Having connected to Milvus Lite, you can:
Check Quickstart to see what Milvus can do.
Learn the basic operations of Milvus:
Deploy your Milvus cluster on clouds:
Explore Milvus Backup, an open-source tool for Milvus data backups.
Explore Birdwatcher, an open-source tool for debugging Milvus and dynamic configuration updates.
Explore Attu, an open-source GUI tool for intuitive Milvus management.