--- title: Supercharge pgvector: 4x Faster HNSW with AlloyDB description: AlloyDB's Columnar Engine now accelerates pgvector HNSW vector search, delivering up to 4x–4.9x higher queries per second compared to standard PostgreSQL HNSW.... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/supercharge-pgvector-4x-faster-hnsw-with-alloydb-tkk8hpcfr twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Supercharge pgvector: 4x Faster HNSW with AlloyDB | daily.dev og:description: AlloyDB's Columnar Engine now accelerates pgvector HNSW vector search, delivering up to 4x–4.9x higher queries per second compared to standard PostgreSQL HNSW.... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/supercharge-pgvector-4x-faster-hnsw-with-alloydb-tkk8hpcfr og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/TKk8HPCfr.png og:image:alt: Supercharge pgvector: 4x Faster HNSW with AlloyDB og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Supercharge pgvector: 4x Faster HNSW with AlloyDB **[Google Cloud](https://daily.dev/sources/gcp)** · 6 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary AlloyDB's Columnar Engine now accelerates pgvector HNSW vector search, delivering up to 4x–4.9x higher queries per second compared to standard PostgreSQL HNSW. The feature works by pinning the HNSW index directly into a specialized in-memory columnar format, bypassing the standard PostgreSQL buffer manager overhead (page pinning, lock acquisition, LRU management). Benchmarks on the GloVe 100 Angular dataset (1M+ records) show that at a fixed QPS of ~350, enabling the columnar engine improves recall from 0.78 to over 0.94. No application code changes are required — the same pgvector SQL syntax works. Enabling requires setting two flags and calling a single SQL function to cache the index. The feature is currently in preview on AlloyDB. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Scale pgvector with binary quantization on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL](https://daily.dev/posts/scale-pgvector-with-binary-quantization-on-amazon-aurora-postgresql-a9xxlb7je) · AWS Database Blog · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#postgresql](https://daily.dev/tags/postgresql), [#vector-search](https://daily.dev/tags/vector-search), [#pgvector](https://daily.dev/tags/pgvector), [#alloydb](https://daily.dev/tags/alloydb) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/supercharge-pgvector-4x-faster-hnsw-with-alloydb-tkk8hpcfr) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Supercharge pgvector: 4x Faster HNSW with AlloyDB","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/supercharge-pgvector-4x-faster-hnsw-with-alloydb-tkk8hpcfr","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/supercharge-pgvector-4x-faster-hnsw-with-alloydb-tkk8hpcfr"},"datePublished":"2026-07-21T16:05:53.642Z","dateModified":"2026-07-21T16:06:16.029Z","description":"AlloyDB's Columnar Engine now accelerates pgvector HNSW vector search, delivering up to 4x–4.9x higher queries per second compared to standard PostgreSQL HNSW....","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/c8389e0d01460d44bba75ab1169983ab?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/c8389e0d01460d44bba75ab1169983ab?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Google Cloud","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Google Cloud","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/gcp","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/gcp"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/supercharge-pgvector-4x-faster-hnsw-with-alloydb-tkk8hpcfr","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"postgresql,vector-search,pgvector,alloydb","timeRequired":"PT6M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Google Cloud","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/gcp"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Supercharge pgvector: 4x Faster HNSW with AlloyDB"}]} ```