Manage indexes

In this section, we explain how you can get a list of your indexes, create an index, delete an index, and describe an index.

To learn about the concepts related to indexes, see Indexes.

Getting information on your indexes

List all your Pinecone indexes:

Python

pinecone.list_indexes()

Get the configuration and current status of an index named “example-index”:

Python

pinecone.describe_index('example-index')

Creating an index

The simplest way to create an index is as follows. This gives you an index with a single pod that will perform approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search using cosine similarity:

Python

pinecone.create_index("example-index", dimension=128)

A more complex index can be created as follows. This creates an index that measures similarity by Euclidean distance and runs on 4 s1 (storage-optimized) pods of size x1:

Python

pinecone.create_index("example-index", dimension=128, metric="euclidean", pods=4, pod_type="s1.x1")

Create an index from a collection

To create an index from a collection, use the create_index operation and provide a source_collection parameter containing the name of the collection from which you wish to create an index. The new index is queryable and writable.

Creating an index from a collection generally takes about 10 minutes. Creating a p2 index from a collection can take several hours when the number of vectors is on the order of 1M.

Example

The following example creates an index named example-index with 128 dimensions from a collection named example-collection.

Python

pinecone.create_index("example-index", dimension=128, source_collection="example-collection")

For more information about each pod type and size, see Indexes.

For the full list of parameters available to customize an index, see the create_index API reference.

Changing pod sizes

The default pod size is x1. After index creation, you can increase the pod size for an index.

Increasing the pod size of your index does not result in downtime. Reads and writes continue uninterrupted during the scaling process. Currently, you cannot reduce the pod size of your indexes. Your number of replicas and your total number of pods remain the same, but each pod changes size. Resizing completes in about 10 minutes.

To learn more about pod sizes, see Indexes.

Increasing the pod size for an index

To change the pod size of an existing index, use the configure_index operation and append the new size to the pod_type parameter, separated by a period (.).

Projects in the gcp-starter environment do not use pods.

Example

The following example assumes that example-index has size x1 and changes the size to x2.

Python

pinecone.configure_index("example-index", pod_type="s1.x2")

Checking the status of a pod size change

To check the status of a pod size change, use the describe_index operation. The status field in the results contains the key-value pair "state":"ScalingUp" or "state":"ScalingDown" during the resizing process and the key-value pair "state":"Ready" after the process is complete.

The index fullness metric provided by describe_index_stats may be inaccurate until the resizing process is complete.

Example

The following example uses describe_index to get the index status of the index example-index. The status field contains the key-value pair "state":"ScalingUp", indicating that the resizing process is still ongoing.

Python

pinecone.describe_index("example-index")

Replicas

You can increase the number of replicas for your index to increase throughput (QPS). All indexes start with replicas=1.

Indexes in the gcp-starter environment do not support replicas.

Example

The following example uses the configure_index operation to set the number of replicas for the index example-index to 4.

Python

pinecone.configure_index("example-index", replicas=4)

See the configure_index API reference for more details.

Selective metadata indexing

By default, Pinecone indexes all metadata. When you index metadata fields, you can filter vector search queries using those fields. When you store metadata fields without indexing them, you keep memory utilization low, especially when you have many unique metadata values, and therefore can fit more vectors per pod.

Searches without metadata filters do not consider metadata. To combine keywords with semantic search, see sparse-dense embeddings.

When you create a new index, you can specify which metadata fields to index using the metadata_config parameter. Projects on the gcp-starter environment do not support the metadata_config parameter.

Example

Python

metadata_config = {
    "indexed": ["metadata-field-name"]
}

pinecone.create_index("example-index", dimension=128,
                      metadata_config=metadata_config)

The value for the metadata_config parameter is a JSON object containing the names of the metadata fields to index.

JSON

{
    "indexed": [
        "metadata-field-1",
        "metadata-field-2",
        "metadata-field-n"
    ]
}

When you provide a metadata_config object, Pinecone only indexes the metadata fields present in that object: any metadata fields absent from the metadata_config object are not indexed.

When a metadata field is indexed, you can filter your queries using that metadata field; if a metadata field is not indexed, metadata filtering ignores that field.

Examples

The following example creates an index that only indexes the genre metadata field. Queries against this index that filter for the genre metadata field may return results; queries that filter for other metadata fields behave as though those fields do not exist.

Python

metadata_config = {
    "indexed": ["genre"]
}

pinecone.create_index("example-index", dimension=128,
                      metadata_config=metadata_config)

Deleting an index

This operation will delete all of the data and the computing resources associated with the index.

When you create an index, it runs as a service until you delete it. Users are
billed for running indexes, so we recommend you delete any indexes you’re not
using. This will minimize your costs.

Delete a Pinecone index named “pinecone-index”:

Python

pinecone.delete_index("example-index")