This page describes known limitations and feature restrictions in Pinecone.

General

  • Upserts
    • Pinecone is eventually consistent, so there can be a slight delay before upserted records are available to query. After upserting records, use the describe_index_stats operation to check if the current vector count matches the number of records you expect, although this method may not work for pod-based indexes with multiple replicas.
    • Only indexes using the dotproduct distance metric support querying sparse-dense vectors. Upserting, updating, and fetching sparse-dense vectors in indexes with a different distance metric will succeed, but querying will return an error.
    • Indexes created before February 22, 2023 do not support sparse vectors.
  • Metadata
    • Null metadata values aren’t supported. Instead of setting a key to null, remove the key from the metadata payload.
    • Nested JSON objects are not supported.

Serverless indexes

Serverless indexes do not support the following features: