Milvus Lite is a lightweight, embedded version of Milvus, a high-performance vector database, designed for rapid prototyping, local development, and edge devices. It provides core vector search functionalities and shares the same API as Milvus Standalone and Distributed deployments, ensuring a consistent development experience across various scales. Data is persisted locally in an SQLite file. The library is actively maintained as part of the `pymilvus` ecosystem, with the current version being 2.5.1.
pip install -U pymilvus[milvus-lite]Verified import paths — ran on the pinned version, not inferred.
This quickstart demonstrates how to initialize Milvus Lite using `MilvusClient` with a local database file, define a collection schema, insert data (vectors and scalar fields), perform a vector similarity search, and query data. The `uri` parameter for `MilvusClient` points to a local file, which acts as the Milvus Lite database.
Evaluate your scale requirements early. For larger datasets or production, plan to migrate to other Milvus deployments. Milvus Lite provides a command-line tool for data migration.
If precise control over index types or more advanced indexing is critical, ensure you are on version 2.4.11 or later for IVF_FLAT support. For full index flexibility, use a non-Lite Milvus deployment.
If your application requires partitions, user management, or aliases, you must use Milvus Standalone, Milvus Distributed, or Zilliz Cloud.
Be mindful of the `uri` parameter when transitioning an application developed with Milvus Lite to a different Milvus deployment. The rest of the client-side code should largely remain compatible.