Customers who sign up for a Standard or Enterprise plan on or after August 18, 2025 cannot create pod-based indexes. Instead, create serverless indexes, and consider using dedicated read nodes for large workloads (millions of records or more, and moderate or high query rates).
Once a collection is created, it cannot be moved to a different project.
Use cases
Creating a collection is useful when performing tasks like the following:- Protecting an index from manual or system failures.
- Temporarily shutting down an index.
- Copying the data from one index into a different index.
- Making a backup of your index.
- Experimenting with different index configurations.
Performance
Collections operations perform differently, depending on the pod type of the index:- Creating a
p1
ors1
index from a collection takes approximately 10 minutes. - Creating a
p2
index from a collection can take several hours when the number of vectors is on the order of 1,000,000.
Limitations
Collection limitations are as follows:- You can only perform operations on collections in the current Pinecone project.