An example embedding workflow

This page provides an example workflow that demonstrates how the embedding() function works together with your table-stored data and pgvector functionality. The example uses plain-text input to fetch a result from a database that relies on large language model (LLM)-driven semantic parsing of the text's meaning.

An example scenario

Imagine a database running on AlloyDB with the following aspects:

  • The database contains a table, items. Each row in this table describes an item that your business sells.

  • The items table contains a column, complaints. This TEXT column stores buyer complaints logged about each item.

  • The database integrates with the Vertex AI Model Garden, giving it access to the textembedding-gecko English models.

Even though this database stores complaints about items, these complaints are stored as plain text, making it challenging to query. For example, if you want to see which items have the most complaints from customers who received the wrong color of merchandise, then you can perform ordinary SQL queries on the table, looking for various keyword matches. However, this approach only matches rows that contain those exact keywords.

For example, a basic SQL query such as SELECT * FROM item WHERE complaints LIKE "%wrong color%" doesn't return a row whose complaints field contains only The picture shows a blue one, but the one I received was red.

SQL queries using LLM-powered embeddings can help bridge this gap. By applying embeddings, you can query the table in this example for items whose complaints have semantic similarity to a given text prompt, such as "It was the wrong color".

The following steps show how to enable this in the example setup described earlier.

Before you begin

Make sure that you meet the following requirements:

Required database extension

  • Ensure that the following extensions are installed on your AlloyDB database.

    • google_ml_integration extension

    • vector extension, version 0.5.0.google-1 or later

For more information about installing and managing extensions, see Configure database extensions.

  • Set the google_ml_integration.enable_model_support database flag to off.

Set up model access

Before you can generate embeddings from an AlloyDB database, you must configure AlloyDB to work with a text embedding model.

To work with the cloud-based textembeddings-gecko model, you need to integrate your database with Vertex AI.

Prepare the table

Before you run LLM-based queries on the items table's content, you must prepare the table to store and index embeddings based on your existing data.

Create a column to store embeddings

Add a column to the table for storing embeddings.

ALTER TABLE items ADD COLUMN complaint_embedding vector(768);

This example specifies 768 as an argument, because that is the number of dimensions supported by the textembedding-gecko English models. For more information, see Generate an embedding.

The example applies the vector data type to the column for ease of using pgvector functions and operators with its values.

Populate the new column

If you already have embeddings in .csv format, follow the steps in Store vector embeddings to store your embeddings.

Optionally, use the embedding() function to populate this new column with embeddings in case you have text stored in thecomplaints column. In this example setup, AlloyDB generates the embeddings using the textembedding-gecko model, version 003.

UPDATE items SET complaint_embedding = embedding('textembedding-gecko@003', complaints);

This example implicitly casts the real[] return value of embedding() into a vector value, in order to store the value into the vector column created earlier.

Create an index

To improve performance, add an index to items that uses the scalar-quantization techniques.

CREATE INDEX complaint_embed_idx ON items
  USING ivf (complaint_embedding vector_l2_ops)
  WITH (lists = 20, quantizer = 'SQ8');

For more information on creating approximate nearest-neighbor indexes, see Indexing.

Run LLM-powered queries with provided text

You can now make semantic nearest-neighbor queries on the items table. The following query uses the <-> operator provided by pgvector to sort the table's rows on semantic proximity to the text It was the wrong color and return the top ten complaints. The query displays the id and name values of the first sorted row.

SELECT id, name FROM items
  ORDER BY complaint_embedding::vector
  <-> embedding('textembedding-gecko@003', 'It was the wrong color') LIMIT 10;

What's next