Re: Treating float arrays as vectors?

On 6/17/21 7:13 AM, Celia McInnis wrote:
> I would love it if there was a vector data type in postgresql along with
> such vector operations as addition, subtraction, scalar multiplication,
> cross product, dot product, normalization, length and various sorts of
> vector distances.

I wrote an extension to define vector-based functions that take & return
numeric arrays:

https://github.com/pjungwir/floatvec

It only has basic arithmetic, but matrix math functions could be added.

If you want aggregate functions instead I wrote another extension for that:

https://github.com/pjungwir/aggs_for_vecs

I haven't touched either in a while, but if you find they have problems
on modern versions of Postgres, let me know and I should be able to get
them updated quickly.

I experimented a bit with an AVX implementation, and it showed a
worthwhile performance improvement, but I never got around to adding it
to all functions, so it was just a proof-of-concept. I could dust that
off if you're interested. But since the extension is C things are
already pretty fast.

Yours,

--
Paul ~{:-)
pj(at)illuminatedcomputing(dot)com