# Known limitations

This page describes known limitations and feature restrictions in Pinecone.

## Upserts

- Pinecone is eventually consistent, so there can be a slight delay before [upserted records](/guides/index-data-upsert-data) are available to query. After upserting records, use the [`describe_index_stats`](/guides/database-2026-07-data-plane-describeindexstats) operation to check whether the current vector count matches the number of records you expect, although this method may not work for pod-based indexes with multiple replicas.
- Only indexes using the [dotproduct distance metric](/guides/index-data-indexing-overview#dotproduct) support querying sparse-dense vectors. Upserting, updating, and fetching sparse-dense vectors in indexes with a different distance metric will succeed, but querying will return an error.
- Indexes created before February 22, 2023 don't support sparse vectors.

## Metadata

- Null metadata values aren't supported. Instead of setting a key to `null`, remove the key from the metadata payload.
- Nested JSON objects aren't supported.

## Serverless indexes

Serverless indexes don't support the following features:

- [Filtering index statistics by metadata](/guides/database-2026-07-data-plane-describeindexstats)
- [Private endpoints](/guides/move-to-production-configure-private-endpoints)

  - This feature is available on AWS only.

## Related pages

- [Pinecone Database limits overview](./apis-database-limits.md)
- [Rate limits](./apis-database-limits-rate-limits.md)
- [Object limits](./apis-database-limits-object-limits.md)
- [Operation limits](./apis-database-limits-operation-limits.md)
- [Identifier limits](./apis-database-limits-identifier-limits.md)

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