Generate vector embeddings for textual data in bulk using partitioned DML

This document explains how to generate and backfill vector embeddings in bulk for textual data (STRING or JSON) that is stored in Spanner using SQL and the Vertex AI textembedding-gecko model.

Tip: We recommend backfilling your embeddings at a time when you're not making a large number of updates to the text data that you're generating embeddings for. This is to minimize lock contention and maintain low latency in your database.

Prerequisites

You must have a table in your Spanner database that contains textual data (STRING or JSON). For more information about importing data, see the Spanner import and export overview.

Example use case

Suppose you have a table in Spanner with the following schema. This table contains millions of records.

GoogleSQL

CREATE TABLE Products (
  product_id INT64 NOT NULL,
  name STRING(MAX),
  description STRING(MAX)
) PRIMARY KEY(product_id);

PostgreSQL

CREATE TABLE Products (
  product_id INT8 NOT NULL,
  name TEXT,
  description TEXT,
  PRIMARY KEY(product_id)
);

Your goal is to generate vector embeddings for the description column in this table to find similar items to recommend to customers to improve their shopping experience using vector search.

Register an embedding model

GoogleSQL

Register an embedding model with the Vertex AI textembedding-gecko endpoint in your Spanner database:

CREATE MODEL MODEL_NAME
INPUT(
  content STRING(MAX)
)
OUTPUT(
  embeddings STRUCT<values ARRAY<FLOAT32>>
)
REMOTE OPTIONS(
    endpoint = '//aiplatform.googleapis.com/projects/PROJECT/locations/LOCATION/publishers/google/models/textembedding-gecko$MODEL_VERSION',
  default_batch_size = 5
)

Replace the following:

• MODEL_NAME: the name of the embedding model
• PROJECT: the project hosting the Vertex AI endpoint
• LOCATION: the location of the Vertex AI endpoint
• MODEL_VERSION: the version of the textembedding-gecko embedding model

PostgreSQL

In the PostgreSQL dialect, there is no need to register the model. You pass the endpoint name directly to the spanner.ML_PREDICT_ROW function call.

For best practices, consider the following:

• To maintain isolation of quotas, use an endpoint in a different project to generate and backfill embeddings than the production endpoint. Reserve the production endpoint to serve production traffic.
• Make sure that the model endpoint supports the value of default_batch_size. You can override the default_batch_size with the query hint @{remote_udf_max_rows_per_rpc=NEW_NUMBER}. For information about the default_batch_size limit for each region, see Get text embeddings for a snippet of text.
• Define the endpoint with a specific model version (e.g. @003) instead of @latest. This is because the embedding vectors generated for the same piece of text might differ depending on the version of the model that you use; which is why you want to avoid using different model versions to generate embeddings in the same dataset. In addition, updating the model version in the model definition statement doesn't update the embeddings that are already generated with this model. One way to manage the model version for embeddings is to create an additional column in the table which stores the model version.
• Custom tuned textembedding-gecko models are not supported with the GoogleSQL ML.PREDICT and PostgreSQL spanner.ML_PREDICT_ROW function.

Test the end-to-end integration of the embeddings model

You can execute a query to test that the embedding model is configured successfully, and embeddings are retrieved. For example, run the following query:

GoogleSQL

SELECT embeddings.values
FROM SAFE.ML.PREDICT(
  MODEL MODEL_NAME,
  (SELECT description AS content FROM products LIMIT 10)
);

Replace the following:

• MODEL_NAME: the name of the embedding model

PostgreSQL

SELECT spanner.ML_PREDICT_ROW(
    'projects/PROJECT/locations/LOCATION/publishers/google/models/textembedding-gecko$MODEL_VERSION',
    JSONB_BUILD_OBJECT('instances', JSONB_BUILD_ARRAY(JSONB_BUILD_OBJECT('content', description))))
FROM Products
LIMIT 10;

Replace the following:

• PROJECT: the project hosting the Vertex AI endpoint
• LOCATION: the location of the Vertex AI endpoint
• MODEL_VERSION: the version of the textembedding-gecko embedding model

Update the source table to include additional columns to store the embeddings

Next, update the source table schema to include an additional column of the data type ARRAY<FLOAT32> to store the generated embeddings:

GoogleSQL

ALTER TABLE TABLE_NAME
ADD COLUMN EMBEDDING_COLUMN_NAME ARRAY<FLOAT32>;

Replace the following:

• TABLE_NAME: the name of the source table
• EMBEDDING_COLUMN_NAME: the name of the column in which you want to add generated embeddings

PostgreSQL

ALTER TABLE TABLE_NAME
ADD COLUMN EMBEDDING_COLUMN_NAME real[];

Replace the following:

• TABLE_NAME: the name of the source table
• EMBEDDING_COLUMN_NAME: the name of the column in which you want to add generated embeddings

For example, using the products table example, run:

GoogleSQL

ALTER TABLE Products
ADD COLUMN desc_embed ARRAY<FLOAT32>;

PostgreSQL

ALTER TABLE Products
ADD COLUMN desc_embed real[];

You can add another column to manage the version of the embedding model.

GoogleSQL

ALTER TABLE Products
ADD COLUMN desc_embed_model_version INT64;

PostgreSQL

ALTER TABLE Products
ADD COLUMN desc_embed_model_version INT8;

Increase the quota for Vertex AI

You might need to increase the Vertex AI API quota for textembedding-gecko in the region which uses the model. To request an increase, see Vertex AI Quota increases.

For more information, see Vertex AI quotas and limits.

Backfill embeddings

Finally, execute the following UPDATE statement using partitioned DML to generate embeddings for the textual data column and store the embeddings in your database. You can store the model version along with the embeddings. We recommend that you execute this query during a low-traffic window in your database.

GoogleSQL

UPDATE TABLE_NAME
SET 
  TABLE_NAME.EMBEDDING_COLUMN_NAME = (
    SELECT embeddings.values
    FROM SAFE.ML.PREDICT(
      MODEL MODEL_NAME,
      (SELECT TABLE_NAME.DATA_COLUMN_NAME AS content)
    ) @{remote_udf_max_rows_per_rpc=MAX_ROWS}
  ),
  TABLE_NAME.EMBEDDING_VERSION_COLUMN = MODEL_VERSION
WHERE FILTER_CONDITION;

Replace the following:

• TABLE_NAME: the name of the table with the textual data
• EMBEDDING_COLUMN_NAME: the name of the column in which you want to add generated embeddings
• DATA_COLUMN_NAME: the name of the column with the textual data
• MODEL_NAME: the name of the embedding model
• MAX_ROWS: the maximum number of rows per RPC
• EMBEDDING_VERSION_COLUMN: the column that manages the version of the textembedding-gecko embedding model used to backfill your embeddings
• MODEL_VERSION: the version of the textembedding-gecko embedding model
• FILTER_CONDITION: a partitionable filter condition that you want to apply

Using SAFE.ML.PREDICT returns NULL for failed requests. You can also use SAFE.ML.PREDICT in combination with a WHERE embedding_column IS NULL filter to rerun your query without computing the embeddings for the fields that are already computed.

PostgreSQL

UPDATE TABLE_NAME
SET 
  EMBEDDING_COLUMN_NAME = spanner.FLOAT32_ARRAY(spanner.ML_PREDICT_ROW(
    'projects/PROJECT/locations/LOCATION/publishers/google/models/textembedding-gecko$MODEL_VERSION', 
    JSONB_BUILD_OBJECT('instances', JSONB_BUILD_ARRAY(JSONB_BUILD_OBJECT('content', DATA_COLUMN_NAME)))
  ) /*@ remote_udf_max_rows_per_rpc=MAX_ROWS */ ->'predictions'->0->'embeddings'->'values'),
  EMBEDDING_VERSION_COLUMN = MODEL_VERSION
WHERE FILTER_CONDITION;

Replace the following:

• TABLE_NAME: the name of the table with the textual data
• EMBEDDING_COLUMN_NAME: the name of the column in which you want to add generated embeddings
• DATA_COLUMN_NAME: the name of the column with the textual data
• PROJECT: the project hosting the Vertex AI endpoint
• LOCATION: the location of the Vertex AI endpoint
• MODEL_VERSION: the version of the textembedding-gecko embedding model
• MAX_ROWS: the maximum number of rows per RPC
• EMBEDDING_VERSION_COLUMN: the column that manages the version of the textembedding-gecko embedding model used to backfill your embeddings
• FILTER_CONDITION: a partitionable filter condition that you want to apply

An example backfill query for the products table:

GoogleSQL

UPDATE products
SET
  products.desc_embed = (
    SELECT embeddings.values
    FROM SAFE.ML.PREDICT(
      MODEL gecko_model,
      (SELECT products.description AS content)
    ) @{remote_udf_max_rows_per_rpc=200}
  ),
  products.desc_embed_model_version = 3
WHERE products.desc_embed IS NULL;

PostgreSQL

UPDATE products
SET
  desc_embed = spanner.FLOAT32_ARRAY(spanner.ML_PREDICT_ROW(
    'projects/PROJECT/locations/LOCATION/publishers/google/models/textembedding-gecko@003', 
    JSONB_BUILD_OBJECT('instances', JSONB_BUILD_ARRAY(JSONB_BUILD_OBJECT('content', description)))
  ) /*@ remote_udf_max_rows_per_rpc=200 */ ->'predictions'->0->'embeddings'->'values'),
  desc_embed_model_version = 3
WHERE desc_embed IS NULL;

For best practices, consider the following:

• The default gRPC timeout for the Spanner API is one hour. Depending on the amount of embeddings you are backfilling, you might need to increase this timeout to ensure that the UPDATE partitioned DML has sufficient time to complete. For more information, see Configure custom timeouts and retries.

Performance and other considerations

Consider the following to optimize performance when backfilling embedding data.

Number of nodes

Partitioned DML executes the given DML statement on different partitions in parallel. For instances with a high number of nodes, you might observe quota errors during the execution of partitioned DML. If the Vertex AI API requests are throttled due to Vertex AI API quota limits, then Spanner retries these failures under the partitioned DML transaction mode for a maximum of 20 times. If you observe a high rate of quota errors in Vertex AI, then increase the quota for Vertex AI.

Size of text in the data column

The Vertex AI embedding model has limits on the maximum number of tokens for each text input. Different model versions have different token limits. Each Vertex AI request can have multiple input text fields, but there is a limit on the maximum number of tokens which is present in a single request. For GoogleSQL databases, if you encounter an INVALID_ARGUMENT error with a "Request is too large" message, try reducing the batch size to avoid the error. To do so, you can configure default_batch_size or use the @{remote_udf_max_outstanding_rpcs} query hint when registering the model.

Number of API requests sent to Vertex AI

You can use the query hint @{remote_udf_max_outstanding_rpcs} to increase or decrease the number of requests sent to Vertex AI from Spanner. Be aware that increasing this limit can increase the CPU and memory usage of the Spanner instance. For GoogleSQL databases, using this query hint overrides the default_batch_size configured for your model.

Monitor backfill progress

You can monitor the number of requests, latency, and network bytes sent to Vertex AI from Spanner using the system insights dashboard.

What's next

• Learn how to perform a similarity vector search by finding the K-nearest neighbors.
• Learn more about machine learning and embeddings in our crash course on embeddings.