Lance
lance.org
Spec sheet
- Purpose
- Lance is an open lakehouse format for multimodal AI, built for data on object storage.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Product
- Lance is an open source lakehouse format for multimodal AI, with file, table, and catalog specifications for object storage.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Integrations
- Documented integrations include DataFusion, Spark, DuckDB, Trino, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Ray, Hugging Face, PostgreSQL, and Flink.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Support
- The contributor guide directs users with questions to the Lance Discord for real-time support.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- License
- The site identifies Lance as open source under the Apache-2.0 license.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Catalogs
- Catalog implementations listed include Apache Hive, Apache Polaris, Apache Gravitino, Unity Catalog, and AWS Glue.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Community support
- The project links users to Discord and a mailing list for community communication.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Data management
- The table format supports ACID transactions, schema evolution, time travel, and incremental updates through MVCC.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Getting started
- The quickstart identifies the Python SDK, installed with `pip install pylance`, as the easiest way to start using Lance.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Incubating integrations
- The governance page identifies Lance Context, Data Viewer, Flink, Graph, Trino, and pglance as incubating projects whose APIs or functionality may change.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Multimodal data
- Lance stores images, videos, audio, text, and embeddings alongside tabular data in one format.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Notable limit
- The current unstable Lance 2.3 file format has no compatibility guarantee and the documentation says it should not be used in production.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Python SDK
- The quickstart identifies pylance as the Python SDK and gives `pip install pylance` as the installation command.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Random access
- The site says Lance offers 100× faster random access than Parquet and Iceberg.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Schema evolution
- Lance supports adding columns with backfill by writing new Lance files rather than rewriting the full table.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Search
- Lance combines vector similarity, BM25 full-text search, and SQL analytics on the same dataset, accelerated by secondary indexes.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Security reporting
- The community page asks users to report security vulnerabilities privately to the PMC mailing list and avoid public disclosure until the issue is resolved.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- SQL access
- Lance datasets can be queried with SQL through integrations including DataFusion, Spark, DuckDB, and Trino.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Storage
- Lance can commit directly to object storage, and its Directory Catalog supports deployments directly on object stores without additional infrastructure.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
- Versioning
- The format supports ACID transactions, time travel, and dataset versioning.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Plans and prices
Lance Free Open source · Apache-2.0 Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Where Specifiction places it
- Data Version Control Tools#22 of 367.8