Mozilla Builders
Scalar Quantization (SQ) ​
"Quantization" refers to a variety of methods and techniques for reducing the size of vectors in a vector index. Scalar quantization (SQ) refers to a specific technique where each individual floating point element in a vector is scaled to a small element type, like float16, int8.
Most embedding models generate float32 vectors. Each float32 takes up 4 bytes of space. This can add up, especially when working with a large amount of vectors or vectors with many dimensions. However, if you scale them to float16 or int8 vectors, they only take up 2 bytes of space and 1 bytes of space respectively, saving you precious space at the expense of some quality.
sql
select vec_quantize_float16(vec_f32('[]'), 'unit');
select vec_quantize_int8(vec_f32('[]'), 'unit');
select vec_quantize('float16', vec_f32('...'));
select vec_quantize('int8', vec_f32('...'));
select vec_quantize('bit', vec_f32('...'));
select vec_quantize('sqf16', vec_f32('...'));
select vec_quantize('sqi8', vec_f32('...'));
select vec_quantize('bq2', vec_f32('...'));