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lancedb/docs/web/enterprise/distributed-compaction.mdx
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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.

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

https://claude.ai/code/session_018PXMCbRH6i5w47TsjeEUMT

---------

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

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---
title: "Distributed compaction"
sidebarTitle: "Distributed compaction"
description: "How LanceDB Enterprise distributes compaction across a fleet of job workers."
icon: "compress"
availability:
embedded: unavailable
enterprise: available
---
Distributed compaction splits a table's fragments into independent,
fragment-disjoint tasks and fans them out across job workers in LanceDB
Enterprise. Unlike an index build, a compaction plan needs no bin-packing:
Lance's own planner already produces disjoint tasks, so workers claim and
execute them directly through the job registry, with no coordination
needed to decide who does what. See [Architecture](/index#architecture).
```mermaid
flowchart LR
L["Lance's planner<br/>splits fragments into<br/>disjoint tasks"] --> R[("Job registry")]
R --> W1["Worker<br/>claims fragments 1-2"]
R --> W2["Worker<br/>claims fragments 3-4"]
R --> W3["Worker<br/>claims fragments 5-6"]
W1 --> C["Fleet-wide eligibility gate:<br/>one worker claims the commit"]
W2 --> C
W3 --> C
```
No task depends on another's result, so a worker that finishes early
simply claims another task rather than waiting on its peers. Committing is
where the fleet does coordinate: finished tasks go through a shared
eligibility gate, and only the one worker that claims the commit actually
writes it, rather than each worker committing its own task independently.
Whether a failed task can still let the rest commit depends on the remap
mode. Inline remap is all-or-nothing: one failed task fails the whole job,
since the commit updates every affected index inline and can't skip a
task's share of that. Deferred remap can commit a subset -- a failed
task's fragments are abandoned and replanned in a later round, while the
rest of the job's tasks commit without waiting on it. See
[Advanced Conflict Resolution](/enterprise/advanced-conflict-resolution)
for when compaction defers a remap at all.
## Compaction interfaces {#compaction-interfaces}
- [Compaction](/maintenance/compaction) for triggering and configuring a compaction.
- [Garbage Collection](/maintenance/cleanup) for removing files compaction and other operations leave behind.
- [Job Framework](/basics/jobs) for the job types a deployment runs on its own schedule.