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Jack Ye
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Query and Job were one page because they share the _async convention, but they are different things: a query returns rows and streams them, a job returns an outcome you wait for. Two pages now, query first, each carrying a short pointer to the other rather than the shared framing. Agentic Skills absorbs the agent plugin tutorial, which was a separate page in Use Cases describing the same plugin in more detail -- the two had diverged, with the tutorial carrying the fuller install instructions. It also moves to Getting Started: installing the plugin is something you do before writing anything, not a concept to understand.
79 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
79 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
---
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title: "Lakehouse and catalog"
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sidebarTitle: "Lakehouse & Catalog"
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description: "What a multimodal lakehouse holds, and how the catalog organizes it."
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icon: sitemap
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keywords: ["lakehouse", "catalog", "database", "namespace", "table", "view", "function"]
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---
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LanceDB is a **multimodal lakehouse**: data sits in open [Lance](/basics/lance)
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tables on object storage, and a catalog gives those tables names, structure, and
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the operations that act on them.
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The lakehouse part is why images, embeddings, and the columns you derive from
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them live in one table rather than in a warehouse plus a vector store plus a
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feature store. The catalog part is what this page is about.
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## The objects {#objects}
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| Object | What it is |
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| --- | --- |
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| [Database](/management/database) | The root. A connection opens exactly one. |
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| [Namespace](/management/namespace) | A named grouping inside a database. Can nest. |
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| [Table](/management/table) | Rows and columns, versioned. What most operations act on. |
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| [Materialized view](/feature-engineering/materialized-views) | A table whose contents come from a query, computed and stored. |
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| [View](/management/view) | A saved query. Computed when read, not stored. |
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| [Function](/management/function) | Registered code, applied to produce column values. |
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```
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database
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└── namespace
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├── table
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├── materialized view (a table, defined by a query)
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├── view (a query, not stored)
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└── function
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```
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A namespace can contain further namespaces, so the hierarchy goes as deep as you
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need. A table is reached by its path through it.
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This page is about what the objects *are*. For the operations on them --
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connecting, creating, listing, dropping -- see [Management](/management).
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## A table is more than rows {#tables}
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A Lance table carries things a warehouse table does not, and most of the rest of
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these docs is about one of them:
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| --- | --- |
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| **Columns** | including vectors, blobs, and columns [computed](/feature-engineering/add-computed-column) from other columns |
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| **Versions** | every write commits one, so reads can [travel back](/management/table#versioning) |
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| **Indexes** | vector, full-text, and scalar, built over the columns |
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| **Branches** | isolated lines of change you can [merge or discard](/tables/branching) |
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That is why "add a feature column" is a normal operation here rather than a
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migration: it writes one new column and leaves the expensive data alone.
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## Views and materialized views are different objects {#views}
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The names are close enough to mislead. Both are defined by a query over other
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tables; the difference is when that query runs.
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- A **materialized view** stores its rows. A refresh computes them, and reads are
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reads of stored data -- fast, and as current as the last refresh.
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- A **view** stores only the query. Every read runs it, so a view is never stale
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and never faster than the query it wraps.
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Reach for a materialized view when the query is expensive and the data changes
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less often than it is read. Reach for a view when correctness matters more than
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latency, or when the query is cheap.
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## What is not a catalog object {#elsewhere}
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**Indexes** belong to a table rather than standing alone, and creating one is a
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performance decision -- see [Maintenance](/indexing).
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**Jobs** are not stored data at all; they are handles to work the server is
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doing. See [Jobs](/basics/jobs).
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