docs: add comments about metadata conventions (#4054)

In LanceDB Enterprise, we've adopted these conventions to give some
"canonical" metadata paths. This lets us display them in a certain way
in the UI or let agents standardize on them, to assume they'll find info
in a certain place. This PR (only comments/docs) just documents those
choices.
This commit is contained in:
Dan Tasse
2026-08-26 14:19:44 -04:00
committed by GitHub
parent b78f2a5044
commit 8b7e13b0c6
6 changed files with 61 additions and 4 deletions
+13
View File
@@ -2127,12 +2127,25 @@ class Table(ABC):
----------
updates : dict
One or more dicts, each with:
- "path": str — dot-path to the field (e.g. "embedding" or "a.b.c").
- "metadata": dict[str, str | None] — keys to set; a value of ``None``
deletes that key.
- "replace": bool, optional — replace the field's whole metadata map
instead of merging (default False).
The following keys are treated specially, by convention, and should
be used when appropriate:
- "lancedb:description": for a human-readable description of a field.
- ``"lancedb:tag:<name>"`` for a user-defined key-value tag, where the
suffix names the tag category; e.g. "lancedb:tag:model": "clip".
- "lancedb:logical-column" for a column grouping; e.g. "feature_v1"
and "feature_v2" might be in the same logical column.
- "lancedb:status" for status options ("production", "candidate",
"deprecated", "archived") to designate the current life cycle
state of this column.
Returns
-------
UpdateFieldMetadataResult