Deleting Records in Pinecone, A Comprehensive Guide

Data manipulation is a critical aspect of any vector database, and Pinecone is no exception. While inserting and searching for vectors is well-understood, deleting them is another critical operation you should master. In this blog post, we will walk through various methods to delete records in a Pinecone vector store using Python.

Setting Up Pinecone

First, let’s start by initializing Pinecone and creating an index. We’ll add some vectors along with metadata to illustrate the deletion processes.

import pinecone

pinecone.init(api_key="your-api-key", environment="us-west1-gcp")
index = pinecone.Index("example-index")

index.upsert([
    ("A", [0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1], {"genre": "comedy", "year": 2020}),
    ("B", [0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 0.2], {"genre": "documentary", "year": 2019}),
    ("C", [0.3, 0.3, 0.3, 0.3, 0.3, 0.3, 0.3, 0.3], {"genre": "comedy", "year": 2019}),
    ("D", [0.4, 0.4, 0.4, 0.4, 0.4, 0.4, 0.4, 0.4], {"genre": "drama"}),
    ("E", [0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5], {"genre": "drama"})
])

Deleting a Single Record

The simplest form of deletion is to remove a single record by its ID.

index.delete(ids=["id-1", "id-2"], namespace='example-namespace')

Deleting Records by Filtering

Pinecone allows you to delete multiple records based on metadata. However, note that projects in the gcp-starter region do not support deleting by metadata.

Here’s how you can delete all records that match a certain condition:

index.delete(
    filter={
        "genre": {"$eq": "documentary"},
        "year": 2019
    }
)

Deleting All Records in a Namespace

Namespaces help in logically partitioning data within an index. To delete all records within a namespace, use the following code:

index.delete(delete_all=True, namespace='example-namespace')

Deleting All Records in an Index

In some cases, you might need to remove all records from an index. Be cautious while using this operation as it will clear all your data in that index.

index.delete(delete_all=True)

Conclusion

Knowing how to effectively manage your data is crucial for optimizing your operations with Pinecone or any other database. We hope this guide provides you with all the necessary details to handle record deletion in Pinecone effectively.