pinecone

What it is and what it does

Pinecone is a Python client library for interacting with Pinecone's managed vector database service. It handles index creation and lifecycle management, vector upsert operations (with automatic batching), and similarity search queries. The SDK supports both synchronous and asynchronous workflows via AsyncPinecone, making it suitable for both blocking and event-driven applications.

The package abstracts away HTTP transport details through httpx, uses msgspec and orjson for efficient serialization, and implements retry logic with adaptive concurrency control to handle rate limits gracefully. It's designed for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, semantic search, and other AI/ML workflows that rely on vector similarity. Configuration is minimal—typically just an API key and optional host/timeout parameters—and the SDK supports both serverless and managed index specifications.

Use it for

• Build RAG pipelines that retrieve semantically similar documents or embeddings to augment LLM prompts.
• Implement semantic search features that find similar items (products, articles, images) based on embedding vectors.
• Store and query high-dimensional embeddings from language models or computer vision models at scale.
• Run real-time similarity matching for recommendation systems or personalization engines.
• Integrate vector search into async Python applications using the AsyncPinecone client.

Worth the install?

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Install

pinecone on PyPI

Before you install

Medium install friction due to compiled wheels for multiple platforms (macOS, Linux, Windows, ARM). Active maintenance with a release 72 days ago and recent commits; production-stable status. Three lightweight runtime dependencies (httpx, msgspec, orjson) add minimal overhead.

Requires Python 3.10 or later. Requires a valid Pinecone API key (set via api_key parameter or PINECONE_API_KEY environment variable).

License in practice

Apache-2.0 permissive license allows commercial and private use with minimal restrictions; suitable for most projects.

Quickstart

pip install pinecone

from pinecone import Pinecone, ServerlessSpec

pc = Pinecone(api_key="your-api-key")
pc.indexes.create(
    name="my-index",
    dimension=1536,
    metric="cosine",
    spec=ServerlessSpec(cloud="aws", region="us-east-1"),
)
index = pc.index("my-index")
index.upsert(vectors=[("id-1", [0.1, 0.2, 0.3])])
results = index.query(vector=[0.1, 0.2, 0.3], top_k=10)

Package facts

Evidence: pinecone-9.1.0-cp310-abi3-macosx_10_12_x86_64.whl; pinecone-9.1.0-cp310-abi3-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl; pinecone-9.1.0-cp310-abi3-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.manylinux2014_aarch64.whl; pinecone-9.1.0-cp310-abi3-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.manylinux2014_x86_64.whl; pinecone-9.1.0-cp310-abi3-musllinux_1_2_aarch64.whl; pinecone-9.1.0-cp310-abi3-musllinux_1_2_x86_64.whl; pinecone-9.1.0-cp310-abi3-win_amd64.whl

Tags

More Software Development packages

See also pinecone-client · pinecone-plugin-assistant · pinecone-plugin-inference · upstash-vector · langchain-pinecone · llama-index-vector-stores-pinecone · pinecone-plugin-interface · pinecone-text · apache-airflow-providers-pinecone · opentelemetry-instrumentation-pinecone