Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I built a vector database API on Cloudflare

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 30 posts

Re: Show HN: I built a vector database API on Cloudflare

#11

Post by tomschwiha »

threeseed wrote: post #4
pushedx wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to say this. Very cool project but unfortunately the name is immediately a trademark issue.

Indeed. Athena is a pretty popular database service and is trademarked by AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/ I would expect a cease and desist at some point.

From checking the trademark database they registered their trademark only a few months ago (Dec. 21, 2023).

The first commit to AthenaDB was on Dec 11, 2023.

Is the prior use to a trademark the important date or the actual date of registration?

Re: Show HN: I built a vector database API on Cloudflare

#12

Post by tomschwiha »

michaelt wrote: post #10
nvartolomei wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The page says they hold the trademark to “Amazon Athena”. Does this come into conflict with a project named “AthenaDB”?

Even if you avoid legal issues, there's still the practical issues. Fighting for ranking on Google. Conflicting tags on stackoverflow. Confused users sending you complaints about someone else's product. And so on.

For me in Google at least the greek goddess wins, 50/50 shared with the movie.

Re: Show HN: I built a vector database API on Cloudflare

#13

Post by vertis »

charcircuit wrote: post #9

It's a stretch to call this building a vector database when this is just an API over Cloudflare's distributed database offerings. This also uses a fixed embedding which will not be compatible with all machine learning projects that people will want to use a vector database for. The chosen embedding only supports text so making an image search for example wouldn't be possible to do.

Glass half empty then.

Most vector databases are using some local or external provider to get the embeddings and then using some storage engine to store and retreive the embeddings. Whether it's pgvector leaning on postgresql, or chromadb on sqlite, or pinecone originally being on rocksdb (I believe they've now built their own engine).

This is no different, and is still in it's infancy, so one presumes they might add support for other methods of getting the embeddings much as chromadb has.

Re: Show HN: I built a vector database API on Cloudflare

#15

Post by scosman »

tomschwiha wrote: post #11
threeseed wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Athena is a pretty popular database service and is trademarked by AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/ I would expect a cease and desist at some point.

From checking the trademark database they registered their trademark only a few months ago (Dec. 21, 2023). The first commit to AthenaDB was on Dec 11, 2023. Is the prior use to a trademark the important date or the actual date of registration?

Unregistered trademarks are a thing too. In both cases its use in market time, not registration time.

Re: Show HN: I built a vector database API on Cloudflare

#16

Post by scosman »

WaxProlix wrote: post #2

Cool project, I look forward to digging in a bit - been meaning to check out some of cloudflare's dev offerings for a bit. Athena is already a name in the cloudy database segment though - Amazon's managed Presto offering https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/what-is.html

Trademark aside: you’ll probably never rank in search which is also a pain.

Re: Show HN: I built a vector database API on Cloudflare

#17

Post by rustyboy »

Curious at how people are using vectordbs at an enterprise level.

Let's say you have a team of 5 data scientists/developers who are working on a collection of GenAI features/tooling. Does it make sense to have one single vectordb where all documentation is embedded and powers all the apps, or do you make a bunch of niche databases that are tailored to the service?

Also, one of the things i've noticed is that these databases seem less optimized for update operations so when user #1 embeds and saves 100 documents then user #2 does the same, with 10 overlapping - I'd guess that doubling of the similiarity space would exclude new documents. How are people handling that?

Re: Show HN: I built a vector database API on Cloudflare

#18

Post by chand1012 »

michaelt wrote: post #10
nvartolomei wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The page says they hold the trademark to “Amazon Athena”. Does this come into conflict with a project named “AthenaDB”?

Even if you avoid legal issues, there's still the practical issues. Fighting for ranking on Google. Conflicting tags on stackoverflow. Confused users sending you complaints about someone else's product. And so on.

Naming is hard. AthenaDB was the initial name of the MVP, I just never came up with a better one. Guess I'll have to do that now that I know AWS has another DB adjacent product with that name.

Re: Show HN: I built a vector database API on Cloudflare

#19

Post by blovescoffee »

habibur wrote: post #8

One thing I can confirm from this code is that unlike what I previously thought vector search is not the main point of a vector database, rather it's read, write, update crud, just like normal SQL databases, with the exception that data are vector data instead of text and numbers.

What did you previously think a vector db was?

Re: Show HN: I built a vector database API on Cloudflare

#20

Post by iambateman »

tomschwiha wrote: post #11
threeseed wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Athena is a pretty popular database service and is trademarked by AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/ I would expect a cease and desist at some point.

From checking the trademark database they registered their trademark only a few months ago (Dec. 21, 2023). The first commit to AthenaDB was on Dec 11, 2023. Is the prior use to a trademark the important date or the actual date of registration?

Just because you could potentially win in court doesn’t mean you want to go toe to toe with Amazon legal, ya know?
Post reply on HN