Upsert Entities

This topic describes how to upsert entities in Milvus.

Upserting is a combination of insert and delete operations. In the context of a Milvus vector database, an upsert is a data-level operation that will overwrite an existing entity if a specified field already exists in a collection, and insert a new entity if the specified value doesn’t already exist.

The following example upserts 3,000 rows of randomly generated data as the example data. When performing upsert operations, it's important to note that the operation may compromise performance. This is because the operation involves deleting data during execution.

Prepare data

First, prepare the data to upsert. The type of data to upsert must match the schema of the collection, otherwise Milvus will raise an exception.

Milvus supports default values for scalar fields, excluding a primary key field. This indicates that some fields can be left empty during data inserts or upserts. For more information, refer to Create a Collection.

# Generate data to upsert
import random
nb = 3000
dim = 8
vectors = [[random.random() for _ in range(dim)] for _ in range(nb)]
data = [
    [i for i in range(nb)],
    [str(i) for i in range(nb)],
    [i for i in range(10000, 10000+nb)],
    vectors,
    [str("dy"*i) for i in range(nb)]
]

nEntities:= 3000
dim:= 8
idList:= make([]int64, 0, nEntities)
randomList:= make([]float64, 0, nEntities)
embeddingList := make([][]float32, 0, nEntities)

for i := 0; i < nEntities; i++ {
    idList = append(idList, int64(i))
}
    
for i := 0; i < nEntities; i++ {
    randomList = append(randomList, rand.Float64())
}
  
for i := 0; i < nEntities; i++ {
    vec := make([]float32, 0, dim)
for j := 0; j < dim; j++ {
        vec = append(vec, rand.Float32())
    }
    embeddingList = append(embeddingList, vec)
}
idColData := entity.NewColumnInt64("ID", idList)
randomColData := entity.NewColumnDouble("random", randomList)
embeddingColData := entity.NewColumnFloatVector("embeddings", dim, embeddingList)

Upsert data

Upsert the data to the collection.

from pymilvus import Collection
collection = Collection("book") # Get an existing collection.
mr = collection.upsert(data)

if _, err := c.Upsert(ctx, collectionName, "", idColData, embeddingColData);
err != nil {
        log.Fatalf("failed to upsert data, err: %v", err)
}

Flush data

When data is upserted into Milvus it is updated and inserted into segments. Segments have to reach a certain size to be sealed and indexed. Unsealed segments will be searched brute force. In order to avoid this with any remainder data, it is best to call flush(). The flush() call will seal any remaining segments and send them for indexing. It is important to only call this method at the end of an upsert session. Calling it too often will cause fragmented data that will need to be cleaned later on.

Limits

• Updating primary key fields is not supported by upsert().
• upsert() is not applicable and an error can occur if autoID is set to True for primary key fields.

What's next

Learn more basic operations of Milvus:

• Build an index for vectors
• Conduct a vector search
• Conduct a hybrid search