Chroma Explorer - Modern ChromaDB Desktop Client
A beautiful, native desktop application for exploring and managing your ChromaDB vector databases.
Compression is all you need: 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x cheaper vector database
sanyamsinghal.notion.siteSaved July 21, 2025
Summary
The article discusses four methods to achieve significant storage reduction in vector databases: using Float16 compression (2x), int8 quantization (4x), reducing embedding size (8x), and combining size reduction with quantization (16x).
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is highlighted as a way to shrink embedding dimensions, which retains most semantic information while enabling greater compression. Empirical results show that even with up to 16x storage reduction, semantic search recall remains high, typically missing only 2 out of 10 relevant results.
The main trade-off is a modest decrease in recall as compression increases, but at substantial cost savings.
