Introduction

Pinecone’s APIs let you interact programatically with your Pinecone account.

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Database API

Use the Database API to store and query records in the Pinecone Vector Database. This API is comprised of data plane and control plane endpoints:

• The data plane handles requests to write and read records in indexes. Indexes are partitioned into one or more logical namespaces, and all write and read requests are scoped by namespace.

  For each index, there is a unique URL for performing data plane operations in the form of https://{index_host}/{operation}. The Pinecone SDKs construct these URLs for you. However, when using the API directly, you must explicitly specify them.

  You can get index URLs in the Pinecone console or using the describe_index operation. For more details, see Get an index endpoint.

• The control plane handles requests to create and manage indexes and collections.

  The global URL for all control plane operations is https://api.pinecone.io. You use this URL regardless of the cloud environment where an index is hosted.

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Inference API

Use the Inference API to generate embeddings for text data such as queries or passages and to rerank items like text documents.

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Assistant API

Use the Assistant API to upload documents, ask questions, and receive responses that reference your documents. This is known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).