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Brendan Clement
486f6c66bb
This PR is part of the documentation revamp. Once the full set of PRs is merged, we’ll publish the combined site to staging for review before updating docs.lancedb.com. The introductory pages are inconsistent, and the old PR split asked reviewers to review some pages twice. This brings the final quickstart, connection guide, architecture and Concepts pages together. It clarifies OSS and Enterprise, simplifies naming rules and includes the navigation and diagram fixes from #4489. Function and Secret details on the Concepts pages are MDX comments until their release, and CONTRIBUTING.md explains how to write docs before a release. Includes #4532. Ingestion, search and integrations are in #4533; data workflows, SQL and operations are in #4534. Each MDX file has one PR owner. Local assembly, Mint validation and link checks pass. The Function pages stay published from `main` until #4534 hides them, so hold publication until the complete stack is integrated.
46 lines
1.8 KiB
Plaintext
46 lines
1.8 KiB
Plaintext
---
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title: "Lance format"
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sidebarTitle: "Lance Format"
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description: "The open format for multimodal data behind LanceDB."
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icon: "/static/assets/logo/lance-logo-gray.svg"
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keywords: ["lance", "format", "multimodal", "versioning", "column evolution"]
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---
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## Lance format overview {#standard}
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[Lance](https://lance.org/) is an open-source, columnar format designed for
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multimodal AI. It defines how data is stored and organized into versioned tables.
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<span id="embedded" />
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<span id="enterprise" />
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LanceDB OSS and LanceDB Enterprise both use Lance as their storage foundation.
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The format is developed as an independent open-source project, with its own
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specification and tools.
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## Multimodal data {#storage}
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A Lance table can hold images, video, audio, text, embeddings and structured
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metadata together. For example, a video dataset can keep each clip alongside
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its caption, labels and embeddings, so applications can search and work with
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those fields together.
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## Data access, versioning and column updates {#capabilities}
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- **Efficient data access.** Read individual rows for retrieval and training,
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or scan columns for analytics.
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- **Versioned data.** Read an earlier table version to reproduce an experiment
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or inspect previous results, while that version is retained.
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- **Independent column updates.** Add embeddings or other derived features
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without rewriting the existing image, video or text columns.
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## Learn more {#next}
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<span id="versioning" />
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<span id="evolution" />
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- [Lance format specification](https://lance.org/format): how the format works.
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- [Table versioning](/management/table#versioning): read and manage table versions.
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- [Computed columns](/feature-engineering/add-computed-column): add derived features to your data.
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- [Architecture](/architecture): how LanceDB OSS and Enterprise build on Lance.
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