AI & Vectors

Creating and managing collections

Connecting to your database with Colab.


This guide will walk you through a basic "Hello World" example using Colab and Supabase Vecs. You'll learn how to:

  1. Launch a Postgres database that uses pgvector to store embeddings
  2. Launch a notebook that connects to your database
  3. Create a vector collection
  4. Add data to the collection
  5. Query the collection

Project setup

Let's create a new Postgres database. This is as simple as starting a new Project in Supabase:

  1. Create a new project in the Supabase dashboard.
  2. Enter your project details. Remember to store your password somewhere safe.

Your database will be available in less than a minute.

Finding your credentials:

You can find your project credentials inside the project settings, including:

Launching a notebook

Launch our vector_hello_world notebook in Colab:

At the top of the notebook, you'll see a button Copy to Drive. Click this button to copy the notebook to your Google Drive.

Connecting to your database

Inside the Notebook, find the cell which specifies the DB_CONNECTION. It will contain some code like this:


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import vecs
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DB_CONNECTION = "postgresql://<user>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<db_name>"
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# create vector store client
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vx = vecs.create_client(DB_CONNECTION)

Replace the DB_CONNECTION with your own connection string for your database. You can find the Postgres connection string in the Database Settings of your Supabase project.

Stepping through the notebook

Now all that's left is to step through the notebook. You can do this by clicking the "execute" button (ctrl+enter) at the top left of each code cell. The notebook guides you through the process of creating a collection, adding data to it, and querying it.

You can view the inserted items in the Table Editor, by selecting the vecs schema from the schema dropdown.

Colab documents

Next steps

You can now start building your own applications with Vecs. Check our examples for ideas.