Lance v8 reference

Lance is an open columnar format for multimodal AI - "a columnar data format that is 100x faster than Parquet for random access." It is not one format but a stack of interoperating specs: a file format, a table format, index formats, catalog specs, and a namespace client spec. The Rust workspace at lance-format/lance implements all of them plus Python (pylance) and Java bindings.

This skill tracks v8.0.0-beta.14 (the lance-format/lance git tag). Pin against tags, not main - Lance ships beta tags every few days and next-format encodings can change.

The deep reference is references/lance-reference.md. Load it for any concrete schema, parameter, proto, or constraint. This file is the orientation: read it first, then jump into the reference section you need.

Lance vs LanceDB

These are two different things and conflating them produces wrong answers.