---
title: "Lance format"
sidebarTitle: "Lance Format"
description: "The open format for multimodal data behind LanceDB."
icon: "/static/assets/logo/lance-logo-gray.svg"
keywords: ["lance", "format", "multimodal", "versioning", "column evolution"]
---

## Lance format overview {#standard}

[Lance](https://lance.org/) is an open-source, columnar format designed for
multimodal AI. It defines how data is stored and organized into versioned tables.

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LanceDB OSS and LanceDB Enterprise both use Lance as their storage foundation.
The format is developed as an independent open-source project, with its own
specification and tools.

## Multimodal data {#storage}

A Lance table can hold images, video, audio, text, embeddings and structured
metadata together. For example, a video dataset can keep each clip alongside
its caption, labels and embeddings, so applications can search and work with
those fields together.

## Data access, versioning and column updates {#capabilities}

- **Efficient data access.** Read individual rows for retrieval and training,
  or scan columns for analytics.
- **Versioned data.** Read an earlier table version to reproduce an experiment
  or inspect previous results, while that version is retained.
- **Independent column updates.** Add embeddings or other derived features
  without rewriting the existing image, video or text columns.

## Learn more {#next}

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<span id="evolution" />

- [Lance format specification](https://lance.org/format): how the format works.
- [Table versioning](/management/table#versioning): read and manage table versions.
- [Computed columns](/feature-engineering/add-computed-column): add derived features to your data.
- [Architecture](/architecture): how LanceDB OSS and Enterprise build on Lance.