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Milvus is a database that stores, indexes, and manages massive embedding vectors generated by deep neural networks and other machine learning (ML) models.
This notebook shows how to use functionality related to the Milvus vector database.
If you have a large amount of data (e.g., more than a million vectors), we recommend setting up a more performant Milvus server on Docker or Kubernetes.The Milvus server offers support for a variety of indexes. Leveraging these different indexes can significantly enhance the retrieval capabilities and expedite the retrieval process, tailored to your specific requirements.As an illustration, consider the case of Milvus Standalone. To initiate the Docker container, you can run the following command:
from pymilvus import Collection, MilvusException, connections, db, utilityconn = connections.connect(host="127.0.0.1", port=19530)# Check if the database existsdb_name = "milvus_demo"try: existing_databases = db.list_database() if db_name in existing_databases: print(f"Database '{db_name}' already exists.") # Use the database context db.using_database(db_name) # Drop all collections in the database collections = utility.list_collections() for collection_name in collections: collection = Collection(name=collection_name) collection.drop() print(f"Collection '{collection_name}' has been dropped.") db.drop_database(db_name) print(f"Database '{db_name}' has been deleted.") else: print(f"Database '{db_name}' does not exist.") database = db.create_database(db_name) print(f"Database '{db_name}' created successfully.")except MilvusException as e: print(f"An error occurred: {e}")
Database 'milvus_demo' does not exist.Database 'milvus_demo' created successfully.
Note the change in the URI below. Once the instance is initialized, navigate to 127.0.0.1:9091/webui to view the local web UI.Here is an example of how you create your vector store instance with the Milvus database serivce:
from langchain_milvus import BM25BuiltInFunction, MilvusURI = "http://localhost:19530"vectorstore = Milvus( embedding_function=embeddings, connection_args={"uri": URI, "token": "root:Milvus", "db_name": "milvus_demo"}, index_params={"index_type": "FLAT", "metric_type": "L2"}, consistency_level="Strong", drop_old=False, # set to True if seeking to drop the collection with that name if it exists)
If you want to use Zilliz Cloud, the fully managed cloud service for Milvus, please adjust the uri and token, which correspond to the Public Endpoint and Api key in Zilliz Cloud.
from uuid import uuid4from langchain_core.documents import Documentdocument_1 = Document( page_content="I had chocolate chip pancakes and scrambled eggs for breakfast this morning.", metadata={"source": "tweet"},)document_2 = Document( page_content="The weather forecast for tomorrow is cloudy and overcast, with a high of 62 degrees.", metadata={"source": "news"},)document_3 = Document( page_content="Building an exciting new project with LangChain - come check it out!", metadata={"source": "tweet"},)document_4 = Document( page_content="Robbers broke into the city bank and stole $1 million in cash.", metadata={"source": "news"},)document_5 = Document( page_content="Wow! That was an amazing movie. I can't wait to see it again.", metadata={"source": "tweet"},)document_6 = Document( page_content="Is the new iPhone worth the price? Read this review to find out.", metadata={"source": "website"},)document_7 = Document( page_content="The top 10 soccer players in the world right now.", metadata={"source": "website"},)document_8 = Document( page_content="LangGraph is the best framework for building stateful, agentic applications!", metadata={"source": "tweet"},)document_9 = Document( page_content="The stock market is down 500 points today due to fears of a recession.", metadata={"source": "news"},)document_10 = Document( page_content="I have a bad feeling I am going to get deleted :(", metadata={"source": "tweet"},)documents = [ document_1, document_2, document_3, document_4, document_5, document_6, document_7, document_8, document_9, document_10,]uuids = [str(uuid4()) for _ in range(len(documents))]vector_store.add_documents(documents=documents, ids=uuids)
Once your vector store has been created and the relevant documents have been added, you will most likely wish to query it during the running of your chain or agent.
results = vector_store.similarity_search( "LangChain provides abstractions to make working with LLMs easy", k=2, expr='source == "tweet"',)for res in results: print(f"* {res.page_content} [{res.metadata}]")
* Building an exciting new project with LangChain - come check it out! [{'pk': '9905001c-a4a3-455e-ab94-72d0ed11b476', 'source': 'tweet'}]* LangGraph is the best framework for building stateful, agentic applications! [{'pk': '1206d237-ee3a-484f-baf2-b5ac38eeb314', 'source': 'tweet'}]
results = vector_store.similarity_search_with_score( "Will it be hot tomorrow?", k=1, expr='source == "news"')for res, score in results: print(f"* [SIM={score:3f}] {res.page_content} [{res.metadata}]")
* [SIM=21192.628906] bar [{'pk': '2', 'source': 'https://example.com'}]
For a full list of all the search options available when using the Milvus vector store, you can visit the API reference.
retriever = vector_store.as_retriever(search_type="mmr", search_kwargs={"k": 1})retriever.invoke("Stealing from the bank is a crime", filter={"source": "news"})
[Document(metadata={'pk': 'eacc7256-d7fa-4036-b1f7-83d7a4bee0c5', 'source': 'news'}, page_content='Robbers broke into the city bank and stole $1 million in cash.')]
The most common hybrid search scenario is the dense + sparse hybrid search, where candidates are retrieved using both semantic vector similarity and precise keyword matching. Results from these methods are merged, reranked, and passed to an LLM to generate the final answer. This approach balances precision and semantic understanding, making it highly effective for diverse query scenarios.
Since Milvus 2.5, full-text search is natively supported through the Sparse-BM25 approach, by representing the BM25 algorithm as sparse vectors. Milvus accepts raw text as input and automatically converts it into sparse vectors stored in a specified field, eliminating the need for manual sparse embedding generation.For full-text search Milvus VectorStore accepts a builtin_function parameter. Through this parameter, you can pass in an instance of the BM25BuiltInFunction. This is different than semantic search which usually passes dense embeddings to the VectorStore,Here is a simple example of hybrid search in Milvus with OpenAI dense embedding for semantic search and BM25 for full-text search:
from langchain_milvus import BM25BuiltInFunction, Milvusfrom langchain_openai import OpenAIEmbeddingsvectorstore = Milvus.from_documents( documents=documents, embedding=OpenAIEmbeddings(), builtin_function=BM25BuiltInFunction(), # `dense` is for OpenAI embeddings, `sparse` is the output field of BM25 function vector_field=["dense", "sparse"], connection_args={ "uri": URI, }, consistency_level="Strong", drop_old=True,)
When you use BM25BuiltInFunction, please note that the full-text search is available in Milvus Standalone and Milvus Distributed, but not in Milvus Lite, although it is on the roadmap for future inclusion. It will also be available in Zilliz Cloud (fully-managed Milvus) soon. Please reach out to support@zilliz.com for more information.
In the code above, we define an instance of BM25BuiltInFunction and pass it to the Milvus object. BM25BuiltInFunction is a lightweight wrapper class for Function in Milvus. We can use it with OpenAIEmbeddings to initialize a dense + sparse hybrid search Milvus vector store instance.BM25BuiltInFunction does not require the client to pass corpus or training, all are automatically processed at the Milvus server’s end, so users do not need to care about any vocabulary and corpus. In addition, users can also customize the analyzer to implement the custom text processing in the BM25.
After the first stage of retrieval, we need to rerank the candidates to get a better result. You can refer to the Reranking for more information.Here is an example for weighted reranking:
query = "What are the novels Lila has written and what are their contents?"vectorstore.similarity_search( query, k=1, ranker_type="weighted", ranker_params={"weights": [0.6, 0.4]})
When building a retrieval app, you often have to build it with multiple users in mind. This means that you may be storing data not just for one user, but for many different users, and they should not be able to see each other’s data.Milvus recommends using partition_key to implement multi-tenancy. Here is an example:
The Partition key feature is not available in Milvus Lite, if you want to use it, you need to start Milvus server, as mentioned above.
from langchain_core.documents import Documentdocs = [ Document(page_content="i worked at kensho", metadata={"namespace": "harrison"}), Document(page_content="i worked at facebook", metadata={"namespace": "ankush"}),]vectorstore = Milvus.from_documents( docs, embeddings, connection_args={"uri": URI}, drop_old=True, partition_key_field="namespace", # Use the "namespace" field as the partition key)
To conduct a search using the partition key, you should include either of the following in the boolean expression of the search request:search_kwargs={"expr": '<partition_key> == "xxxx"'}search_kwargs={"expr": '<partition_key> == in ["xxx", "xxx"]'}Do replace <partition_key> with the name of the field that is designated as the partition key.Milvus changes to a partition based on the specified partition key, filters entities according to the partition key, and searches among the filtered entities.
# This will only get documents for Ankushvectorstore.as_retriever(search_kwargs={"expr": 'namespace == "ankush"'}).invoke( "where did i work?")
[Document(page_content='i worked at facebook', metadata={'namespace': 'ankush'})]
# This will only get documents for Harrisonvectorstore.as_retriever(search_kwargs={"expr": 'namespace == "harrison"'}).invoke( "where did i work?")
[Document(page_content='i worked at kensho', metadata={'namespace': 'harrison'})]
For detailed documentation of all Milvus VectorStore features and configurations head to the [API reference]nce.langchain.com/python/langchain-milvus/vectorstores/milvus/Milvus)