Beginner · 10 min
Incremental Updates: Save 70% on AI Compute Costs
Stop reprocessing entire datasets when one row changes. Pixeltable tracks dependencies and recomputes only what's necessary, saving compute, time, and money.
The Challenge
Traditional AI pipelines reprocess entire datasets when anything changes. Adding one document to 100,000 existing ones triggers a full re-embedding, re-indexing, and re-inference run, wasting hours of compute time and significant API costs.
The Solution
Pixeltable provides intelligent incremental updates. The system tracks which rows changed, identifies affected computed columns, and recomputes only the minimum necessary. Embedding indexes are updated incrementally too.
Implementation Guide
Step-by-step walkthrough with code examples
Automatic Incrementality
See how Pixeltable processes only what's changed.
1import pixeltable as pxt2from pixeltable.functions import openai34# Create table with expensive AI processing5docs = pxt.create_table('app.docs', {6 'document': pxt.Document,7 'title': pxt.String,8})910# Expensive embedding generation11docs.add_computed_column(12 embedding=openai.embeddings(13 docs.title, # Simplified for demo14 model='text-embedding-3-large'15 )16)1718docs.add_embedding_index('title', embedding=docs.embedding)1920# Initial load: processes all 100K documents21docs.insert([...hundred_k_documents])2223# Add 1 new document: processes ONLY the new one24docs.insert([{'document': 'new.pdf', 'title': 'Latest Report'}])25# ✅ 1 embedding generated, not 100,0012627# Update a title: recomputes ONLY that row's embedding28docs.update(29 {'title': 'Updated Report'},30 where=docs.title == 'Latest Report'31)32# ✅ 1 row recomputed, index updated incrementally
Key Benefits
Real Applications
Prerequisites
Performance
Learn More
Related Guides
- Production RAG: From Documents to Answers in One System
Modality: Document
Computed column: Chunk view plus an embedding index
Docs - AI Agents & MCP: Give Your Agents Persistent Multimodal Memory
Modality: Agent state
Computed column: Tool results stored as computed columns on the row
Docs - Audio Transcription Pipeline with OpenAI Whisper
Modality: Audio
Computed column: whisper.transcribe on an Audio column
Docs
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Install Pixeltable and start building in minutes. One pip install, no infrastructure to manage.