Milvus Vector Database Destination

Ingest unstructured documents into Milvus, a high-performance open-source vector database built for scalable similarity search. The pipeline extracts text from the document, chunks it using a configurable strategy, generates vector embeddings, and upserts the chunks with metadata into a Milvus collection.

Configuration

"source": {
    "fileAttributes": {
        "unstructuredAttributes": {
            "fileExtension": "pdf",
            "preserveFilename": true
        }
    }
},
"destination": {
    "milvus": {
        "collectionName": "financial_documents",
        "chunking": {
            "strategy": "recursive",
            "chunkSize": 500,
            "chunkOverlap": 50
        },
        "metadata": {
            "company": "Apple Inc",
            "documentType": "10-Q",
            "filingDate": "2026-01-30"
        },
        "milvusSecretName": "oss/milvus"
    }
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
`collectionName`	string	(required)	Milvus collection name. Auto-created if it doesn’t exist.
`chunking`	object	recursive, 500/50	Chunking strategy configuration (see below).
`metadata`	map	`{}`	Static key-value metadata stored as dynamic fields on every chunk.
`embeddingSecretName`	string	server default	Embedding Vault secret name. Only consulted when the server-level `ai.embedding.secretName` is unset; with the default configuration (`oss/embedding`, seeded automatically) the server-level secret is always used and this field is ignored.
`milvusSecretName`	string	(required)	Vault secret name for Milvus connection.

Supported File Types

Format	Description
PDF (`.pdf`)	Text extracted via Apache PDFBox
Word (`.doc`)	Text extracted via Apache POI (legacy format)
Word (`.docx`)	Text extracted via Apache POI (modern format)
PowerPoint (`.ppt`)	Text extracted via Apache POI (legacy format)
PowerPoint (`.pptx`)	Text extracted via Apache POI (modern format)
Excel (`.xls`, `.xlsx`)	Cell values extracted via Apache POI
HTML (`.html`, `.htm`)	Text extracted via JSoup (tags stripped)
RTF (`.rtf`)	Text extracted via javax.swing RTF parser
Email (`.msg`)	Subject, from, to, and body extracted via Apache POI
Email (`.eml`)	Subject, from, and body extracted via Jakarta Mail
EPUB (`.epub`)	XHTML content extracted and parsed via JSoup
Plain text (`.txt`, `.md`, `.csv`, `.json`, `.xml`)	Content used directly

For structured data (CSV, JSON, XML), use database destinations (PostgreSQL, MongoDB) instead.

Vault Secrets

Milvus connection

vault kv put secret/oss/milvus \
  host="host.docker.internal" \
  port="19530" \
  apiKey=""

Field	Description
`host`	Milvus server hostname. Use `host.docker.internal` for local Milvus.
`port`	gRPC port (default 19530).
`apiKey`	API key / token for Milvus Cloud. Empty string for local instances.

Embedding API

The embedding secret is server-level (ai.embedding.secretName, default oss/embedding) and is seeded automatically by docker/vault-init.sh. See AI Configuration and the Qdrant docs for the full picture.

vault kv put secret/oss/embedding \
  provider="openai" \
  endpoint="https://api.openai.com/v1/embeddings" \
  model="text-embedding-3-small" \
  apiKey="sk-..."

For Anthropic-only deployments, the bundled TEI sidecar serves bge-m3 and vault-init.sh seeds the embedding secret to point at it — no OpenAI key required.

Chunking Strategies

Documents are split into chunks before embedding. Each chunk becomes a separate entity in the Milvus collection with the document’s metadata plus chunk_index, filename, and source_pipeline fields.

"chunking": {
    "strategy": "recursive",
    "chunkSize": 500,
    "chunkOverlap": 50
}

Strategy	Description
`none`	No chunking — one embedding per document. Only for very short documents.
`fixed`	Split by character count. Fast but may cut mid-sentence.
`sentence`	Split on sentence boundaries (`.` `!` `?`). Preserves semantic units.
`paragraph`	Split on double newlines. Ideal for structured documents with clear sections.
`recursive`	Try `\n\n`, then `\n`, then `.`, then space — best general-purpose default.

chunkSize (default 500): maximum characters per chunk
chunkOverlap (default 50): characters of overlap between consecutive chunks

Metadata

Static metadata is stored as dynamic fields on every chunk in the Milvus collection:

"metadata": {
    "company": "Apple Inc",
    "documentType": "10-Q",
    "filingDate": "2026-01-30"
}

This allows filtered vector search queries combining similarity with metadata predicates. Every entity automatically includes:

id — deterministic UUID (idempotent upserts)
text — the chunk text
chunk_index — position of the chunk in the document
filename — original uploaded filename
source_pipeline — pipeline name
embedding — float vector for similarity search

How It Works

Upload — an unstructured file is uploaded via POST /api/v1/pipeline/upload
Extract — text is extracted from the document
Chunk — text is split into chunks using the configured strategy
Embed — each chunk is sent to the embedding API to generate a vector
Upsert — vectors are inserted into the Milvus collection with metadata
Notify — a pipeline notification is published on completion

The collection is auto-created on first upsert with a cosine distance index on the embedding field. Dynamic fields are enabled for metadata.

Running Milvus

Milvus runs outside the pipeline’s Docker Compose (unlike Qdrant, Weaviate, and Chroma, which ship as opt-in Compose profiles). Unlike simpler vector databases, Milvus requires etcd and MinIO as internal dependencies, so a simple docker run won’t work. Option 1 — Milvus standalone script (recommended):

curl -sfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/milvus-io/milvus/master/scripts/standalone_embed.sh -o standalone_embed.sh
bash standalone_embed.sh start

To stop: bash standalone_embed.sh stop Option 2 — Milvus docker-compose:

wget https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/download/v2.4.4/milvus-standalone-docker-compose.yml -O milvus-docker-compose.yml
docker-compose -f milvus-docker-compose.yml up -d

This starts Milvus with its required etcd and MinIO services. For more options, see milvus.io/docs/install_standalone-docker.md.

Verifying

# Check Milvus is running
curl http://localhost:9091/v1/vector/collections

# List collections
curl http://localhost:9091/v1/vector/collections

# Get collection details
curl http://localhost:9091/v1/vector/collections/describe \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"collectionName": "financial_documents"}'

# Query entities
curl -X POST http://localhost:9091/v1/vector/query \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "collectionName": "financial_documents",
    "filter": "chunk_index >= 0",
    "outputFields": ["text", "chunk_index", "filename"],
    "limit": 5
  }'

Getting Started

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Milvus Vector Database Destination

Configuration

Supported File Types

Vault Secrets

Milvus connection

Embedding API

Chunking Strategies

Metadata

How It Works

Running Milvus

Verifying

​Configuration

​Supported File Types

​Vault Secrets

​Milvus connection

​Embedding API

​Chunking Strategies

​Metadata

​How It Works

​Running Milvus

​Verifying

Configuration

Supported File Types

Vault Secrets

Milvus connection

Embedding API

Chunking Strategies

Metadata

How It Works

Running Milvus

Verifying