PAVEDB
Version 0.9.6

Basic operations

The shortest useful path, shown with pavecli because it is the least ceremonious. Every flag is in cli.md; every endpoint is in openapi.json. This page shows the shape, not the surface.

Examples use tenant demo and collection books. They open the local data directory directly, so stop any pavesrv or persistent local Python client using that directory first.

Create a collection

pavecli create-collection demo books

The collection is pinned to an embedder at creation. Take the default unless you have a reason; changing your mind later means a new collection, because vectors from two models cannot share an index.

Ingest

pavecli ingest demo books ./book.txt --docid book-1

PaveDB chunks and embeds the file itself. PDF, CSV and TXT are supported; ingest-text takes a string directly, and ingest-batch takes several documents in one call.

The docid is yours to choose and is the update key: re-ingesting the same docid replaces that document in place. No restart, no separate reindex.

pavecli search demo books "captain nemo" -k 3

Each hit carries its score, the matched text, and where it came from — document id plus the source-specific page, row, or character offset. That provenance is not optional metadata you have to enable; it is what a text-backed hit is.

Inspect and replay

Text searches are logged by default and can be replayed. Query logging can be disabled; raw-vector searches cannot be replayed because no query vector is stored.

pavecli list-queries --tenant demo --collection books
pavecli get-query <query_id>
pavecli replay-query <query_id>

A query_id is unique on its own, so get-query and replay-query take just the id. get-query returns the parameters, timing and result ids of a past search; replay-query runs it again against current data — useful for telling “the index changed” apart from “the query was always wrong”.

To go from a hit down to the exact stored text:

pavecli list-chunks demo books book-1
pavecli get-chunk-content demo books book-1::chunk_0

Clean up

pavecli delete-document demo books book-1
pavecli delete-collection demo books

Where this goes next