Columnar / Storage and tables

Lance

Lance combines a columnar file format, a versioned table format and optional vector indexes. Machine-learning workloads need both selected rows and nearest-neighbor searches from the same store. Parquet groups columns into row groups for analytical scans; Lance pages and row addresses support reaching selected values. Its manifests connect fragments into table versions, while indexes narrow a search. The Lance SDK and LanceDB write these structures and read them back.