## Xata

> [Xata](https://xata.io/) is a serverless data platform, based on PostgreSQL. It provides a Python SDK for interacting with your database, and a UI for managing your data. Xata has a native vector type, which can be added to any table, and supports similarity search. LangChain inserts vectors directly to Xata, and queries it for the nearest neighbors of a given vector, so that you can use all the LangChain Embeddings integrations with Xata.

This notebook guides you how to use Xata as a VectorStore.

## Setup[​](#setup "Direct link to Setup")

### Create a database to use as a vector store[​](#create-a-database-to-use-as-a-vector-store "Direct link to Create a database to use as a vector store")

In the [Xata UI](https://app.xata.io/) create a new database. You can name it whatever you want, in this notepad we’ll use `langchain`. Create a table, again you can name it anything, but we will use `vectors`. Add the following columns via the UI:

*   `content` of type “Text”. This is used to store the `Document.pageContent` values.
*   `embedding` of type “Vector”. Use the dimension used by the model you plan to use. In this notebook we use OpenAI embeddings, which have 1536 dimensions.
*   `source` of type “Text”. This is used as a metadata column by this example.
*   any other columns you want to use as metadata. They are populated from the `Document.metadata` object. For example, if in the `Document.metadata` object you have a `title` property, you can create a `title` column in the table and it will be populated.

Let’s first install our dependencies:

```
%pip install --upgrade --quiet  xata langchain-openai tiktoken langchain
```

Let’s load the OpenAI key to the environemnt. If you don’t have one you can create an OpenAI account and create a key on this [page](https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys).

```
import getpassimport osos.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"] = getpass.getpass("OpenAI API Key:")
```

Similarly, we need to get the environment variables for Xata. You can create a new API key by visiting your [account settings](https://app.xata.io/settings). To find the database URL, go to the Settings page of the database that you have created. The database URL should look something like this: `https://demo-uni3q8.eu-west-1.xata.sh/db/langchain`.

```
api_key = getpass.getpass("Xata API key: ")db_url = input("Xata database URL (copy it from your DB settings):")
```

```
from langchain_community.document_loaders import TextLoaderfrom langchain_community.vectorstores.xata import XataVectorStorefrom langchain_openai import OpenAIEmbeddingsfrom langchain_text_splitters import CharacterTextSplitter
```

### Create the Xata vector store[​](#create-the-xata-vector-store "Direct link to Create the Xata vector store")

Let’s import our test dataset:

```
loader = TextLoader("../../modules/state_of_the_union.txt")documents = loader.load()text_splitter = CharacterTextSplitter(chunk_size=1000, chunk_overlap=0)docs = text_splitter.split_documents(documents)embeddings = OpenAIEmbeddings()
```

Now create the actual vector store, backed by the Xata table.

```
vector_store = XataVectorStore.from_documents(    docs, embeddings, api_key=api_key, db_url=db_url, table_name="vectors")
```

After running the above command, if you go to the Xata UI, you should see the documents loaded together with their embeddings. To use an existing Xata table that already contains vector contents, initialize the XataVectorStore constructor:

```
vector_store = XataVectorStore(    api_key=api_key, db_url=db_url, embedding=embeddings, table_name="vectors")
```

### Similarity Search[​](#similarity-search "Direct link to Similarity Search")

```
query = "What did the president say about Ketanji Brown Jackson"found_docs = vector_store.similarity_search(query)print(found_docs)
```

### Similarity Search with score (vector distance)[​](#similarity-search-with-score-vector-distance "Direct link to Similarity Search with score (vector distance)")

```
query = "What did the president say about Ketanji Brown Jackson"result = vector_store.similarity_search_with_score(query)for doc, score in result:    print(f"document={doc}, score={score}")
```