Backend compatibility

Most QQL statements are transport-neutral. Differences come from backend capability, not a separate language dialect.

The REST and gRPC transports target Qdrant 1.18.x (the bundled OpenAPI schema and protobuf definitions are pinned to v1.18.x). Older servers may reject plan fields introduced in that generation; the edge backend is an in-process engine and does not depend on a server version.

Capability	REST	gRPC	Edge
Parse, validate, inject, explain	yes	yes	yes
Dense nearest search	yes	yes	yes
Sparse and hybrid retrieval	yes	yes	yes
Payload filters	yes	yes	yes
MMR, recommend, formula, order-by, sample, context/discover	yes	yes	yes
Quantization rescore / oversampling (PARAMS quantization = {...})	yes	yes	yes
Cross-encoder reranking (CROSS RERANK)	yes	yes	yes (client-side)
Exact count (COUNT ... WITH (exact = true))	yes	yes	yes
UPSERT with auto-embedding	yes	yes	yes (local embedder)
Query/update batching	yes	yes	fan-out
Grouped search	yes	yes	no
Custom SHARD routing	yes	yes	no
Shard-key administration	yes	yes	no
ALTER COLLECTION	yes	yes	no
Collection PARAMS (replication, sharding)	yes	yes	no
Point-ID query inputs	yes	yes	no
ACORN search parameter	yes	yes	no
Cluster consistency/timeout fields	yes	yes	no

Notes:

• Batching on edge fans out into one operation per request; there is no native batch endpoint.
• Cross-rerank is always executed client-side: the runtime fetches the prefetched candidates, scores (query, document text) pairs with a pair-scoring embedder, and reorders. It is not a Qdrant search variant on any backend.
• Point-ID query inputs (QUERY POINT, RECOMMEND POSITIVE (id)) need materialized vectors; offline, use TEXT or VECTOR inputs instead.
• Timeouts and consistency are request-level REST/gRPC fields and are rejected offline with QQL-EDGE-UNSUPPORTED-TIMEOUT and QQL-EDGE-UNSUPPORTED-CONSISTENCY.

The exact edge surface evolves with qql-edge; treat a plan or execution capability error as authoritative.

Request-level parameters

QQLRemote search controlsTry in playground↗

QUERY TEXT 'search' FROM docs
USING dense
PARAMS (
  timeout = 30,
  consistency = majority,
  hnsw_ef = 64,
  acorn = true,
  max_selectivity = 0.4
)
LIMIT 10;

timeout and consistency map to request-level REST/gRPC fields. HNSW and ACORN options are search-body parameters.