Pixeltable is an open-source declarative backend for multimodal AI applications that unifies the storage, indexing, transformation, and inference of images, video, audio, and documents under a single table interface. It replaces hand-built ETL scripts with incremental, versioned computations so teams can focus on model logic rather than pipeline plumbing.
Native Multimodal Types
- First-class column types (
pxt.Image,pxt.Video,pxt.Document) treating media alongside structured fields - Declarative computed columns that define transformation and inference pipelines once
- Automatic incremental execution and caching to avoid redundant recomputation
Built-in Search & Retrieval
- Embedding indexes and semantic search on any column without external vector infrastructure
- Similarity retrieval and RAG workflows directly within the table abstraction
- Supports retrieval-augmented generation, automated labeling, and object-detection pipelines
Extensibility & Integration
- Custom UDFs and iterators for extending the system with domain-specific logic
- Pre-built adapters connecting to OpenAI, Hugging Face, YOLOX, and other popular services
- External media storage with PostgreSQL-managed metadata and view-maintenance for freshness
- Apache-2.0 licensed with an active contributor community