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Create a collection

Weaviate stores data in "collections". A collection is a set of objects that share the same data structure. In our movie database, we might have a collection of movies, a collection of actors, and a collection of reviews.

Here we will create a collection of movies.

Code​

This example creates a collection for the movie data:

import weaviate from "weaviate-client";
import { WeaviateClient, configure, vectorizer, toBase64FromMedia } from "weaviate-client";

// Instantiate your client (not shown). e.g.:
// const requestHeaders = {'X-VoyageAI-Api-Key': process.env.VOYAGEAI_API_KEY as string,}
// client = weaviate.connectToWeaviateCloud(..., headers: requestHeaders) or
// client = weaviate.connectToLocal(..., headers: requestHeaders)

await client.collections.create({
  name: "Movie",
  properties: [
    { name: "title", dataType: configure.dataType.TEXT },
    { name: "overview", dataType: configure.dataType.TEXT },
    { name: "vote_average", dataType: configure.dataType.NUMBER },
    { name: "genre_ids", dataType: configure.dataType.INT_ARRAY },
    { name: "release_date", dataType: configure.dataType.DATE },
    { name: "tmdb_id", dataType: configure.dataType.INT },
    { name: "poster", dataType: configure.dataType.BLOB }
  ],
  // Define the vectorizer module
  vectorizers: vectorizer.multi2VecVoyageAI({
    imageFields: [{ name: "poster", weight: 0.9 }],
    textFields: [{ name: "title", weight: 0.1 }],
    model: "voyage-multimodal-3"
  }),
  // Define the generative module
  generative: configure.generative.cohere(),
})

client.close()
ts docs  API docs

Each collection definition must have a name. Then, you can define additional parameters like we've done in this example.

Explain the code​

Properties​

Properties are the object attributes that you want to store in the collection. Each property has a name and a data type.

In our movie database, we have properties like title, release_date and genre_ids, with data types like TEXT (string), DATE (date), or INT (integer). It's also possible to have arrays of integers, like we have with genre_ids.

As a multimodal object, we also have the poster property which is the image data, which is saved as a BLOB (binary large object) data type.

Auto-schema​

Weaviate can automatically infer the schema from the data. However, it's a good practice to define the properties explicitly, for better control and to avoid surprises.

Vectorizer configuration​

If you do not specify the vector yourself, Weaviate will use a specified vectorizer to generate vector embeddings from your data.

In this code example, we specify the multi2vec-voyageai module. This module uses the voyage-multimodal-3 model to generate vector embeddings from the text and image data.

You can specify any number of text and image properties to be used for vectorization, and weight them differently. The weights are used to determine the relative importance of each property in the vector embedding generation process. In this example, we vectorize the poster property (an image) with a 90% weight and the title property (a string) with a 10% weight.

  vectorizers: vectorizer.multi2VecVoyageAI({
    imageFields: [{ name: "poster", weight: 0.9 }],
    textFields: [{ name: "title", weight: 0.1 }],
    model: "voyage-multimodal-3"
  }),
ts docs  API docs

Generative configuration​

If you wish to use your collection with a generative model (e.g. a large language model), you must specify the generative module.

In this code example, we specify the cohere module (generative-cohere is the full name) with default options.

  generative: configure.generative.cohere(),
ts docs  API docs
Generative model integration mutability

A collection's generative model integration configuration is mutable from v1.25.23, v1.26.8 and v1.27.1. See this section for details on how to update the collection configuration.

TypeScript named imports​

The code example makes use of named imports such as vectorizer and configure. They are defined in the weaviate module and are used during the collection definition.

import weaviate from "weaviate-client";
import { WeaviateClient, configure, vectorizer, toBase64FromMedia } from "weaviate-client";
ts docs  API docs

Questions and feedback​

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know in the user forum.