Collection

A Collection instance represents a Milvus collection.

class pymilvus.Collection

Constructor

Constructs a collection by name, schema, and other parameters.

Collection(
    name: str,
    schema: CollectionSchema,
    using: str
) 

PARAMETERS:

• name (string) -

  [REQUIRED]

  The name of the collection to create.

• schema (CollectionSchema) -

  The schema used to create the collection.

  The default value is None, indicating that a default schema is used.

  📘What is a schema?

  The schema is responsible for organizing data in the target collection. A valid schema should have multiple fields, which must include a primary key, a vector field, and several scalar fields.

• using (string) -

  The alias of the employed connection.

  The default value is default, indicating that this operation employs the default connection.

• num_shards (int) -

  The number of shards to create along with the creation of this collection.

  The value defaults to 1, indicating that one shard is to be created along with this collection.

  📘What is sharding?

  Sharding refers to distributing write operations to different nodes to make the most of the parallel computing potential of a Milvus cluster for writing data.

  By default, a collection contains one shard.

• consistency_level (int | str)

  The consistency level of the target collection.

  The value defaults to Bounded (1) with options of Strong (0), Bounded (1), Session (2), and Eventually (3).

  📘What is the consistency level?

  Consistency in a distributed database specifically refers to the property that ensures every node or replica has the same view of data when writing or reading data at a given time.

  Zilliz Cloud provides three consistency levels: Strong, Bounded Staleness, and Eventually, with Bounded Staleness set as the default.

  You can easily tune the consistency level when conducting a vector similarity search or query to make it best suit your application.

• timeout (float | None)

  The timeout duration for this operation. Setting this to None indicates that this operation timeouts when any response arrives or any error occurs.

RETURN TYPE:

Collection

RETURNS:

A collection object.

EXCEPTIONS:

• SchemaNotReadyException

  This exception will be raised when the provided schema is invalid.

Examples

from pymilvus import Collection, CollectionSchema, FieldSchema, DataType

# Create a collection using the user-defined schema
primary_key = FieldSchema(
    name="id",
    dtype=DataType.INT64,
    is_primary=True,
)

vector = FieldSchema(
    name="vector",
    dtype=DataType.FLOAT_VECTOR,
    dim=768,
)

schema = CollectionSchema(
    fields = [primary_key, vector]
)

collection = Collection(
    name="test_01",
    schema=schema,
    using="default"
)

Members

The following are the members of the Collection class: