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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: "Operators and literals"
sidebarTitle: "Operators"
description: "Comparison, logical and arithmetic operators, literals, and precedence."
icon: plus-minus
keywords: ["operators", "literals", "precedence", "null", "cast", "interval"]
availability:
embedded: unavailable
enterprise: available
---
LanceDB uses DataFusion's SQL operators. This page describes comparison,
logical and arithmetic operators, literal values, type conversions and
operator precedence.
## Comparison {#comparison}
| | |
| --- | --- |
| `=` `!=` `<>` `<` `<=` `>` `>=` | ordinary comparison |
| `IS NULL` / `IS NOT NULL` | null test (`= NULL` is never true) |
| `IS DISTINCT FROM` | comparison that treats null as a value |
| `BETWEEN a AND b` | inclusive range |
| `IN (...)` | set membership |
| `LIKE` / `ILIKE` | pattern match, `%` and `_` |
| `~` `~*` `!~` | regular expression match |
<Note>
For keyword matching on a text column, [`contains_tokens`](/sql/dql/contains-tokens)
is index-accelerated where `LIKE` is not. Reach for `LIKE` only when you need
its wildcard semantics.
</Note>
## Logical {#logical}
`AND`, `OR`, `NOT`. Three-valued: a comparison against null is **unknown**, and
`NOT unknown` is still unknown. A `WHERE` clause keeps only rows where the
predicate is true, so unknown behaves like false there, but not inside `NOT
IN`, which is the usual place this bites. See
[Subqueries](/sql/dql/subqueries#in-exists).
## Arithmetic {#arithmetic}
`+` `-` `*` `/` `%`, with the usual precedence. String concatenation is `||`.
<Warning>
Arithmetic over a vector column is **list** arithmetic, not scalar arithmetic:
a vector is a `FixedSizeList<Float32>`. When the operation you want is a
similarity comparison, use [vector search](/search/vector-search); whether SQL
can express it [depends on the Enterprise server version](/basics/sql#no-vector-sql).
</Warning>
## Literals {#literals}
| | |
| --- | --- |
| String | `'text'`, with a doubled quote to escape: `'it''s'` |
| Number | `42`, `3.14` |
| Boolean | `TRUE`, `FALSE` |
| Null | `NULL` |
| Date / timestamp | `DATE '2026-01-01'`, `TIMESTAMP '2026-01-01 12:00:00'` |
| Interval | `INTERVAL '7 days'` |
| Array | `[1, 2, 3]` |
Identifiers are quoted with double quotes when they need to be (a reserved word
or a name with mixed case): `SELECT "order" FROM "MyTable"`.
## Casting {#casting}
<CodeGroup>
```sql SQL icon="database"
SELECT CAST(identifier AS VARCHAR) AS with_cast, identifier::VARCHAR AS with_colons
FROM documents
```
</CodeGroup>
Both forms work. Give each its own alias when one projection uses both: they
produce the same expression name, and a projection refuses two columns with
one name. `TRY_CAST` returns null instead of erroring on a value that
will not convert, which is the one to use over a column you do not control.
## Precedence {#precedence}
Highest to lowest: `::` → unary `-` → `* / %` → `+ -` → `||` → comparison →
`IS` → `NOT` → `AND` → `OR`.
Parenthesize anything mixing `AND` and `OR`. `a OR b AND c` is `a OR (b AND c)`,
which is rarely what was meant.