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Overview

This document explains the concepts related to collections in Pinecone. A collection is a static copy of an index. It is a non-queryable representation of a set of vectors and metadata. You can create a collection from an index, and you can create a new index from a collection. This new index can differ from the original source index: the new index can have a different number of pods, a different pod type, or a different similarity metric. Indexes in the gcp-starter environment do not support collections.

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Use cases for collections

Creating a collection from your index is useful when performing tasks like the following:
  • Temporarily shutting down an index
  • Copying the data from one index into a different index;
  • Making a backup of your index
  • Experimenting with different index configurations
To learn about creating backups with collections, see Back up indexes. To learn about creating indexes from collections, see Manage indexes.

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Performance

Collections operations perform differently with different pod types.
  • Creating a collection from an index takes approximately 10 minutes.
  • Creating a p1 or s1 index from a collection takes approximately 10 minutes.
  • Creating a p2 index from a collection can take several hours.

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Limitations

You cannot query or write to a collection after its creation. For this reason, a collection only incurs storage costs. You can only perform operations on collections in the current Pinecone project.