This is not always good advice. Many people require to not use off premise models, due to data ownership issues.

I would therefore suggest a better default for this, such as BERT+Qdrant.

It would be wonderful if there were a simpler (single file, SQLite or DuckDB like) database for vectors than the complex (and in some cases, unfortunately cloud-based) ones available now.

ah sorry, i should read OP better - chroma's default embedding model is sentence transformers - and we have many other integrated - https://github.com/chroma-core/chroma/blob/main/chromadb/uti...

> It would be wonderful if there were a simpler (single file, SQLite or DuckDB like) database for vectors than the complex (and in some cases, unfortunately cloud-based) ones available now.

This is literally chroma!

Admittedly, I don't know much about chroma, but it seems similar to Qdrant to me. Perhaps I'm missing something. It doesn't appear that it stores everything in 1 singledb file, but rather a plethora of files in some directory. Although it does appear that it runs local, which is a huge plus.

You might enjoy milvus-lite: https://zilliz.com/blog/exploring-magic-vector-databases-jup...

   pip install milvus

Chroma is just a wrapper for Clickhouse. I’d go with something like Weaviate or Qdrant that is a lot more mature as far as vector databases.

how do you define chroma as a vector db? a wrapper on top of other databases and hnsw? What about a billion vectors in house~ is chroma all we need?