Database / LanceDB Interview questions
What is LanceDB?
LanceDB is an open-source, embedded vector database built for AI applications, providing vector similarity search, full-text search, and SQL-style filtering over the same table without needing a separate server process to deploy or manage.
It runs directly inside your application process as a library rather than as a standalone service you connect to over a network, which is why it's often compared to SQLite or DuckDB — you import it, point it at a local directory or object storage, and start reading and writing data with no separate database server to stand up.
Under the hood it's built on a Rust core with a custom columnar storage format called Lance, and it's commonly used as the retrieval layer in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, semantic search, and AI agent memory, where an application needs to store embeddings alongside the original text, images, or metadata they came from.
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