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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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