Integrate TiDB Vector Search with SQLAlchemy

This tutorial walks you through how to use SQLAlchemy to interact with TiDB Vector Search, store embeddings, and perform vector search queries.

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial, you need:

• Python 3.8 or higher installed.
• Git installed.
• A TiDB Cloud Serverless cluster. Follow creating a TiDB Cloud Serverless cluster to create your own TiDB Cloud cluster if you don't have one.

Run the sample app

You can quickly learn about how to integrate TiDB Vector Search with SQLAlchemy by following the steps below.

Step 1. Clone the repository

Clone the tidb-vector-python repository to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/pingcap/tidb-vector-python.git

Step 2. Create a virtual environment

Create a virtual environment for your project:

cd tidb-vector-python/examples/orm-sqlalchemy-quickstart
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Step 3. Install the required dependencies

Install the required dependencies for the demo project:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Alternatively, you can install the following packages for your project:

pip install pymysql python-dotenv sqlalchemy tidb-vector

Step 4. Configure the environment variables

1. Navigate to the Clusters page, and then click the name of your target cluster to go to its overview page.

2. Click Connect in the upper-right corner. A connection dialog is displayed.

3. Ensure the configurations in the connection dialog match your environment.

   • Connection Type is set to Public.
   • Branch is set to main.
   • Connect With is set to SQLAlchemy.
   • Operating System matches your environment.
   Tip

   If your program is running in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), switch to the corresponding Linux distribution.

4. Click the PyMySQL tab and copy the connection string.

   Tip

   If you have not set a password yet, click Generate Password to generate a random password.

5. In the root directory of your Python project, create a .env file and paste the connection string into it.

   The following is an example for macOS:

   TIDB_DATABASE_URL="mysql+pymysql://<prefix>.root:<password>@gateway01.<region>.prod.aws.tidbcloud.com:4000/test?ssl_ca=/etc/ssl/cert.pem&ssl_verify_cert=true&ssl_verify_identity=true"
   

Step 5. Run the demo

python sqlalchemy-quickstart.py

Example output:

Get 3-nearest neighbor documents:
  - distance: 0.00853986601633272
    document: fish
  - distance: 0.12712843905603044
    document: dog
  - distance: 0.7327387580875756
    document: tree
Get documents within a certain distance:
  - distance: 0.00853986601633272
    document: fish
  - distance: 0.12712843905603044
    document: dog

Sample code snippets

You can refer to the following sample code snippets to develop your application.

Create vector tables

Connect to TiDB cluster

import os
import dotenv

from sqlalchemy import Column, Integer, create_engine, Text
from sqlalchemy.orm import declarative_base, Session
from tidb_vector.sqlalchemy import VectorType

dotenv.load_dotenv()

tidb_connection_string = os.environ['TIDB_DATABASE_URL']
engine = create_engine(tidb_connection_string)

Define a vector column

Create a table with a column named embedding that stores a 3-dimensional vector.

Base = declarative_base()

class Document(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'sqlalchemy_demo_documents'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    content = Column(Text)
    embedding = Column(VectorType(3))

Store documents with embeddings

with Session(engine) as session:
   session.add(Document(content="dog", embedding=[1, 2, 1]))
   session.add(Document(content="fish", embedding=[1, 2, 4]))
   session.add(Document(content="tree", embedding=[1, 0, 0]))
   session.commit()

Search the nearest neighbor documents

Search for the top-3 documents that are semantically closest to the query vector [1, 2, 3] based on the cosine distance function.

with Session(engine) as session:
   distance = Document.embedding.cosine_distance([1, 2, 3]).label('distance')
   results = session.query(
      Document, distance
   ).order_by(distance).limit(3).all()

Search documents within a certain distance

Search for documents whose cosine distance from the query vector [1, 2, 3] is less than 0.2.

with Session(engine) as session:
    distance = Document.embedding.cosine_distance([1, 2, 3]).label('distance')
    results = session.query(
        Document, distance
    ).filter(distance < 0.2).order_by(distance).limit(3).all()

See also

• Vector Data Types
• Vector Search Index