Files
lancedb/python
Jonathan HsiehandClaude Opus 5.5 ab2ae49200 feat!: carry a FunctionVersion's creation time as epoch millis (#4482)
Moves Function timestamps on the wire from RFC 3339 strings to epoch
milliseconds.

## What

- `FunctionVersion.created_at` (an RFC 3339 string) becomes
`created_at_millis` (milliseconds since the epoch, as an integer).
That's the shape Secrets, jobs and `FunctionErrorRecord` already use.
- Rust: `FunctionVersion::created_at() -> &str` becomes
`created_at_millis() -> i64`.
- Python: `FunctionVersion.created_at: str` becomes `created_at_millis:
int`.
- Fixtures and the mock server now send `1787270400000`, the old
`2026-08-21T00:00:00Z`.

Node.js doesn't expose `FunctionVersion`, so it doesn't change.

## Compatibility

Breaking, and it must ship together with the matching server change: a
server that still sends `created_at` fails to deserialize on this
client. Functions aren't deployed yet, so nothing is migrated.

## Tests

- `cargo test --features remote --test first_class_function_slice1`: 10
passed
- `cargo test --features remote --lib function`: 51 passed
- `pytest python/tests/test_first_class_function*.py`: 100 passed
- clippy, `cargo fmt --check`, ruff check and ruff format are clean

🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)

https://claude.ai/code/session_01BY5xcEGEAa1E11VG55Kd1w

Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 11:17:53 -07:00
..
2025-01-29 08:27:07 -08:00
2024-04-05 16:22:59 -07:00

LanceDB Python SDK

A Python library for LanceDB.

Installation

pip install lancedb

Pre-Haswell x86_64 hosts: lancedb-compat

The default lancedb wheel targets x86-64-haswell (AVX2 + FMA + F16C) for full performance on modern hardware. Pre-Haswell hosts — Intel Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge / Westmere; AMD Bulldozer / Piledriver / Steamroller — don't have AVX2 and crash with Illegal instruction at import lancedb.

For those hosts, install the lancedb-compat package instead:

pip install lancedb-compat

Same Python API (import lancedb works as usual). The compat wheel is compiled at the x86-64-v2 baseline (Nehalem-class) and uses runtime SIMD dispatch in the embedded lance crate to pick the right kernel tier (scalar / AVX / AVX+FMA / AVX2+FMA / AVX-512) at load time, so it still goes fast on modern hardware while running cleanly on the pre-Haswell silicon. Use lance.simd_info() from Python to verify which tier was selected.

lancedb and lancedb-compat install to the same lancedb/ namespace and conflict at install time. Pick one. To switch, pip uninstall lancedb first, then pip install lancedb-compat (or vice-versa).

If you need a custom baseline (or lancedb-compat isn't yet published for your platform), build from source with the override:

RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=x86-64-v2" maturin build --release
pip install ./target/wheels/lancedb-*.whl

Preview Releases

Stable releases are created about every 2 weeks. For the latest features and bug fixes, you can install the preview release. These releases receive the same level of testing as stable releases, but are not guaranteed to be available for more than 6 months after they are released. Once your application is stable, we recommend switching to stable releases.

pip install --pre --extra-index-url https://pypi.fury.io/lancedb/ lancedb

Threading in CPU-limited containers

LanceDB uses separate pools for compute work and storage I/O. On a container with two visible CPUs, current releases intentionally use one compute worker by default; no manual configuration is needed. If every query logs an I/O core reservation warning on a two-CPU container, upgrade from LanceDB 0.21.1 or earlier.

The two commonly tuned environment variables control different resources:

  • LANCE_CPU_THREADS overrides the number of compute workers. One worker is the appropriate setting for a two-CPU container when an explicit override is needed.
  • LANCE_IO_THREADS controls concurrent storage operations, not reserved CPU cores. Its default can be greater than the number of CPUs because I/O workers spend much of their time waiting for storage.

Keep the defaults unless measurements show that the workload benefits from an override. See the Lance threading model for the current defaults and tuning guidance.

Usage

Basic Example

import lancedb
db = lancedb.connect('<PATH_TO_LANCEDB_DATASET>')
table = db.open_table('my_table')
results = table.search([0.1, 0.3]).limit(20).to_list()
print(results)

Development

See CONTRIBUTING.md for information on how to contribute to LanceDB.