Primeros pasos con Pinecone
Creará un índice de Pinecone, hará upsert de vectores con metadatos, realizará consultas de similitud con filtros y gestionará namespaces para separar distintas colecciones de datos.
Primeros pasos con Pinecone es una lección gratuita de AI Engineering Academy en CoddyKit. Esta es la lección 2 de 4. Puedes leer la lección completa abajo gratuitamente — luego la practicas en el navegador con un editor de código integrado y un tutor de IA 24/7. Forma parte de la ruta de aprendizaje de AI Engineering Academy, y tu progreso se sincroniza en la web y la app de CoddyKit. El curso de AI Engineering Academy incluye 4 lecciones en total.
Partes de esta lección aún no han sido traducidas y se muestran en inglés.
What Is Pinecone?
Pinecone is a fully managed vector database that handles infrastructure, scaling, and backups automatically. You interact with it through a Python SDK, sending vectors and metadata via API calls. Pinecone stores them on its servers and answers similarity queries at low latency, even at billions of vectors.
It offers a free tier that is sufficient for learning and small production workloads.
Installing the Pinecone SDK
Install the Pinecone client and initialize it with your API key. Store the API key in an environment variable — never hardcode secrets in source files. The Pinecone class is the main entry point for all operations.
# pip install pinecone-client
import os
from pinecone import Pinecone
pc = Pinecone(api_key=os.environ['PINECONE_API_KEY'])
# List existing indexes to verify connection
existing = pc.list_indexes().names()
print('Existing indexes:', existing)Creating a Pinecone Index
A Pinecone index is the collection that stores your vectors. When creating an index you must specify the dimension (must match your embedding model) and the metric for similarity calculation. For OpenAI embeddings, use dimension=1536 and metric='cosine'.
Index creation is idempotent: the serverless spec creates the index on-demand without pre-allocating capacity.
from pinecone import Pinecone, ServerlessSpec
import os
pc = Pinecone(api_key=os.environ['PINECONE_API_KEY'])
index_name = 'my-rag-index'
if index_name not in pc.list_indexes().names():
pc.create_index(
name=index_name,
dimension=1536, # text-embedding-3-small dimension
metric='cosine',
spec=ServerlessSpec(
cloud='aws',
region='us-east-1'
)
)
print(f'Created index: {index_name}')
else:
print(f'Index already exists: {index_name}')
index = pc.Index(index_name)Upserting Vectors with Metadata
Pinecone uses upsert (insert or update) operations. Each vector requires a unique id string, the values (the embedding as a list of floats), and optional metadata (a dict of filterable fields). If you upsert with an existing id, the old vector is replaced.
from openai import OpenAI
oai = OpenAI()
documents = [
{'id': 'doc-001', 'text': 'What is RAG and how does it work?', 'category': 'faq'},
{'id': 'doc-002', 'text': 'Pinecone is a managed vector database.', 'category': 'docs'},
{'id': 'doc-003', 'text': 'OpenAI embeddings have 1536 dimensions.', 'category': 'docs'}
]
texts = [d['text'] for d in documents]
resp = oai.embeddings.create(model='text-embedding-3-small', input=texts)
vectors = [
{
'id': doc['id'],
'values': resp.data[i].embedding,
'metadata': {'text': doc['text'], 'category': doc['category']}
}
for i, doc in enumerate(documents)
]
index.upsert(vectors=vectors)
print(f'Upserted {len(vectors)} vectors')Querying the Pinecone Index
To search, embed your query and call index.query() with the query vector and top_k for how many results to return. Set include_metadata=True to get the stored metadata back alongside the match ids and scores.
from openai import OpenAI
oai = OpenAI()
query = 'How many dimensions do OpenAI embeddings have?'
q_resp = oai.embeddings.create(model='text-embedding-3-small', input=query)
q_vec = q_resp.data[0].embedding
results = index.query(
vector=q_vec,
top_k=3,
include_metadata=True
)
for match in results['matches']:
score = match['score']
text = match['metadata']['text']
print(f'{score:.4f}: {text}')Filtering by Metadata
Pinecone supports pre-filtering — narrowing the search to vectors that match a metadata condition before running ANN. Use the filter parameter with MongoDB-style operators: $eq, $in, $gt, $lt, $and, $or.
Always index the metadata fields you plan to filter on when creating the index to ensure filter performance.
# Filter to only 'docs' category results
results = index.query(
vector=q_vec,
top_k=5,
filter={
'category': {'$eq': 'docs'}
},
include_metadata=True
)
print(f'Filtered results: {len(results["matches"])}')
for m in results['matches']:
print(f' [{m["metadata"]["category"]}] {m["metadata"]["text"][:60]}')Namespaces for Data Isolation
Pinecone namespaces partition a single index into isolated segments. Queries in one namespace never return results from another, making namespaces ideal for multi-tenant RAG systems where each customer should only search their own documents.
Both upsert and query accept an optional namespace string. The default namespace is an empty string.
# Upsert into a specific namespace
index.upsert(
vectors=[{'id': 'doc-001', 'values': q_vec, 'metadata': {'text': 'Tenant A doc'}}],
namespace='tenant-a'
)
# Query only tenant-a's documents
results = index.query(
vector=q_vec,
top_k=5,
namespace='tenant-a',
include_metadata=True
)
print(f'Tenant-A results: {len(results["matches"])}')Batch Upserting for Large Corpora
When indexing thousands of documents, split your vectors into batches of up to 100 vectors per upsert call (Pinecone's recommended batch size). Larger batches may hit size limits due to the payload size constraint of ~4MB per request.
def batch_upsert(index, vectors, batch_size=100):
total = len(vectors)
for start in range(0, total, batch_size):
batch = vectors[start:start + batch_size]
index.upsert(vectors=batch)
print(f'Upserted {min(start + batch_size, total)}/{total}')
# Usage:
# batch_upsert(index, all_vectors, batch_size=100)Checking Index Statistics
Use index.describe_index_stats() to check how many vectors are stored in each namespace and the total vector count. This is useful for verifying that an upsert completed successfully and for monitoring index growth over time.
stats = index.describe_index_stats()
print(f'Total vectors: {stats["total_vector_count"]}')
print(f'Namespaces:')
for ns, info in stats.get('namespaces', {}).items():
print(f' {ns!r}: {info["vector_count"]} vectors')Deleting and Updating Vectors
Use index.delete(ids=[...]) to remove specific vectors by id. To update a vector (for example when a document is revised), simply upsert with the same id — Pinecone will overwrite the existing entry.
To delete all vectors in a namespace (for example to re-index after a full refresh), use index.delete(delete_all=True, namespace='...').
# Delete specific vectors by id
index.delete(ids=['doc-001', 'doc-002'])
# Update a vector (upsert overwrites by id)
index.upsert(vectors=[{
'id': 'doc-003',
'values': q_vec, # new embedding
'metadata': {'text': 'Updated content.'}
}])
# Delete all vectors in a namespace
# index.delete(delete_all=True, namespace='tenant-a')Pinecone Pricing and Free Tier
Pinecone offers a free serverless tier with 2GB of storage, enough for roughly 300,000 vectors at 1536 dimensions. Beyond that, serverless pricing charges per read unit and write unit consumed.
For production workloads, estimate your monthly cost by calculating: (queries per day × 30 × cost per query) + (total vectors × storage cost). Serverless is often more cost-effective than pod-based plans for variable-traffic workloads.
Quick Check
Test your understanding of AI Engineering concepts from this lesson.
Lesson Recap
In this lesson you learned: Pinecone indexes require matching dimension and metric to your embedding model, upsert operations use a unique id so updating a document simply re-upserts with the same id, and namespaces isolate vector collections within a single index for multi-tenant use cases. Next up we explore pgvector, which brings vector search directly into PostgreSQL.
Preguntas frecuentes
¿La lección «Primeros pasos con Pinecone» es gratis?
Sí — el texto completo de «Primeros pasos con Pinecone» es gratis para leer aquí en la web. Para practicarla de forma interactiva (editor de código integrado y tutor de IA 24/7) y desbloquear el resto del curso de AI Engineering Academy, actualiza a CoddyKit PRO. El curso de AI Engineering Academy incluye 4 lecciones en total.
¿Qué aprenderé en «Primeros pasos con Pinecone»?
Creará un índice de Pinecone, hará upsert de vectores con metadatos, realizará consultas de similitud con filtros y gestionará namespaces para separar distintas colecciones de datos. Practicas AI Engineering Academy con código real que ejecutas directamente en el navegador, y un tutor de IA 24/7 responde tus preguntas mientras trabajas en la lección.
¿Necesito experiencia previa para empezar AI Engineering Academy?
No se requiere experiencia previa. AI Engineering Academy en CoddyKit está estructurado para principiantes hasta estudiantes avanzados, así que puedes empezar aquí o desde el inicio y avanzar a tu ritmo. Esta es la lección 2 de 4.
¿Cuánto tiempo toma la lección «Primeros pasos con Pinecone»?
La mayoría de las lecciones de CoddyKit toman alrededor de 5–10 minutos. Cada una es compacta e interactiva, así que avanzas constantemente y retomas exactamente por donde dejaste en la web y la app.
¿Puedo escribir y ejecutar código en esta lección de AI Engineering Academy?
Sí. Cada lección de AI Engineering Academy incluye un editor de código integrado, así que escribes y ejecutas código real directamente en tu navegador y obtienes retroalimentación instantánea de IA — sin configuración local necesaria.
Todas las lecciones de este curso
- Por qué necesita una base de datos vectorial
- Primeros pasos con Pinecone
- pgvector: embeddings en PostgreSQL
- Selección y evaluación comparativa de vector stores