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Jack YeandClaude Sonnet 5 de95ed3f6d docs: overhaul curation, feature engineering, security and deployment guides (#4748)
A broad documentation pass across the areas LanceDB Enterprise and
Embedded
diverge on most:

**Data Curation** -- GPU Function execution, Slurm scheduling (and what
Slurm is, for readers new to it), blob late materialization as its own
page, joins, aggregation/profiling, sampling, near-duplicate detection,
chunking, distributed shuffle, and IVF-partition clustering.

**Feature Engineering** -- computed columns and materialized views,
restructured to lead with the Function-based path and show the SQL form
side by side with Python throughout; a single Auto Refresh page instead
of
duplicating scheduling details on every refresh page; adaptive
execution;
checkpointing; GPU and Slurm placement for refresh workers; a Training
Cache page for the PyTorch data loader's automatic cache benefit.

**Security & Governance** -- an Audit Log reference (schema, access,
grants), Secrets promoted to an ordinary catalog object with their own
SQL
DDL and a vending/rotation guide, and privilege-table fixes verified
against the authorization source.

**Deployment & Maintenance** -- Horizontal Scaling and OpenTelemetry
moved
into a real Deployment area; Automated Cleanup folded into Intelligent
Auto-Maintenance (every other maintenance decision already lived there);
RTE Compaction and Advanced Conflict Resolution documented in depth.

**Landing page** -- the Enterprise feature comparison table reorganized
(several redundant or stale rows removed, several new areas added), and
the
"why Enterprise" bullets replaced with ones tied to a concrete page
(Performance, Scale, Fault tolerance, Multicloud deployment, Simplify
operations) instead of vague promises.

Plus a full pass addressing lancedb-gatekeeper's review: a real
test-safety
bug (a quickstart test could silently overwrite and delete a
deployment's
own `frames` table), a fabricated SQL statement with no backing
implementation, an actual dedup-guarantee bug in `take_row_ids`, and
dozens
of documentation-accuracy fixes verified against source rather than
taken
on faith -- each either fixed, or left with an explicit note on why it
needs a feature or deployment owner's sign-off instead of being guessed
at.

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---------

Co-authored-by: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-11-03 16:17:24 -08:00

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---
title: "Subqueries"
sidebarTitle: "Subqueries"
description: "Queries inside queries: scalar, IN, EXISTS, correlated, and derived tables."
icon: code-branch
keywords: ["subquery", "exists", "in", "correlated", "derived table", "lateral"]
availability:
embedded: unavailable
enterprise: available
---
A subquery is allowed anywhere an expression or a relation is.
## As a relation {#derived}
<CodeGroup>
```sql SQL icon="database"
SELECT * FROM (
SELECT category, count(*) AS n FROM documents GROUP BY category
) AS counts
WHERE n > 100
```
</CodeGroup>
A derived table needs an alias. Its result cannot be
[sampled](/sql/dql/sampling); sample the table inside it instead:
<CodeGroup>
```sql SQL icon="database"
SELECT * FROM (SELECT * FROM documents TABLESAMPLE (10)) d
```
</CodeGroup>
## As a scalar {#scalar}
<CodeGroup>
```sql SQL icon="database"
SELECT title, (SELECT count(*) FROM revisions r WHERE r.doc_id = d.id) AS revisions
FROM documents AS d
```
</CodeGroup>
A scalar subquery returns one column and at most one row. No rows produces
`NULL`; more than one row is an error.
## IN and EXISTS {#in-exists}
<CodeGroup>
```sql SQL icon="database"
SELECT title FROM documents
WHERE category_id IN (SELECT id FROM categories WHERE active)
SELECT title FROM documents AS d
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM revisions r WHERE r.doc_id = d.id)
```
</CodeGroup>
Use `EXISTS` to test whether a matching row exists and `IN` to test membership
in a set of values. The optimizer may rewrite either into a join; inspect
`EXPLAIN` before choosing one for performance reasons.
`NOT IN` and `NOT EXISTS` differ on nulls: `NOT IN` against a set containing a
null yields no rows, because the comparison is unknown rather than false. Prefer
`NOT EXISTS` unless you have ruled nulls out.
## Correlated subqueries {#correlated}
A subquery referencing a column from the enclosing query, such as `d.id` above,
is correlated, and is conceptually evaluated per outer row. The planner usually
rewrites it into a join.
<Note>
Check with [`EXPLAIN`](/sql/dql/explain) when a correlated subquery is slow. A plan
showing a join has been optimized; one showing a repeated scan has not, and
rewriting it as an explicit [join](/sql/dql/join) is the fix.
</Note>
## CTEs as an alternative {#ctes}
A [CTE](/sql/dql/select#ctes) is a named subquery, and is usually more readable when
the same subquery appears twice or when nesting gets deep.
<CodeGroup>
```sql SQL icon="database"
WITH active AS (SELECT id FROM categories WHERE active)
SELECT title FROM documents WHERE category_id IN (SELECT id FROM active)
```
</CodeGroup>