The synchronous table_names function in python lancedb relies on arrow's
filesystem which behaves slightly differently than object_store. As a
result, the function would not work properly in GCS.
However, the async table_names function uses object_store directly and
thus is accurate. In most cases we can fallback to using the async
table_names function and so this PR does so. The one case we cannot is
if the user is already in an async context (we can't start a new async
event loop). Soon, we can just redirect those users to use the async API
instead of the sync API and so that case will eventually go away. For
now, we fallback to the old behavior.
The fact that we convert errors to strings makes them really hard to
work with. For example, in SaaS we want to know whether the underlying
`lance::Error` was the `InvalidInput` variant, so we can return a 400
instead of a 500.
In order to add support for `add` we needed to migrate the rust `Table`
trait to a `Table` struct and `TableInternal` trait (similar to the way
the connection is designed).
While doing this we also cleaned up some inconsistencies between the
SDKs:
* Python and Node are garbage collected languages and it can be
difficult to trigger something to be freed. The convention for these
languages is to have some kind of close method. I added a close method
to both the table and connection which will drop the underlying rust
object.
* We made significant improvements to table creation in
cc5f2136a6
for the `node` SDK. I copied these changes to the `nodejs` SDK.
* The nodejs tables were using fs to create tmp directories and these
were not getting cleaned up. This is mostly harmless but annoying and so
I changed it up a bit to ensure we cleanup tmp directories.
* ~~countRows in the node SDK was returning `bigint`. I changed it to
return `number`~~ (this actually happened in a previous PR)
* Tables and connections now implement `std::fmt::Display` which is
hooked into python's `__repr__`. Node has no concept of a regular "to
string" function and so I added a `display` method.
* Python method signatures are changing so that optional parameters are
always `Optional[foo] = None` instead of something like `foo = False`.
This is because we want those defaults to be in rust whenever possible
(though we still need to mention the default in documentation).
* I changed the python `AsyncConnection/AsyncTable` classes from
abstract classes with a single implementation to just classes because we
no longer have the remote implementation in python.
Note: this does NOT add the `add` function to the remote table. This PR
was already large enough, and the remote implementation is unique
enough, that I am going to do all the remote stuff at a later date (we
should have the structure in place and correct so there shouldn't be any
refactor concerns)
---------
Co-authored-by: Will Jones <willjones127@gmail.com>
This changes `lancedb` from a "pure python" setuptools project to a
maturin project and adds a rust lancedb dependency.
The async python client is extremely minimal (only `connect` and
`Connection.table_names` are supported). The purpose of this PR is to
get the infrastructure in place for building out the rest of the async
client.
Although this is not technically a breaking change (no APIs are
changing) it is still a considerable change in the way the wheels are
built because they now include the native shared library.
