apache / apache/hudi

RFC-100: Lance File Format support in Hudi

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#14,127 4 comments 11 reactions 1 assignee Claimed by @rahil-c View on GitHub
type:feature
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Description

### Feature Description

**What the feature achieves:**
This feature enables Apache Hudi to use Lance as a storage file format, similar to existing formats we support like Parquet and ORC. By doing so, Hudi tables can store and query multi-modal data —including , semi-structured, and unstructured (e.g., embeddings, images, video) — while still benefiting from Hudi’s transactional, incremental, and metadata management layers.

**Why this feature is needed:**
Existing file formats like Parquet and ORC are optimized for tabular analytics, not AI/ML workloads involving embeddings, tensors, or unstructured content.
Modern data platforms increasingly need to manage hybrid data — where text, image, and vector data coexist with traditional tabular features, and with it newer ai/ml formats have emerged recently such as (Lance, Vortex, Nimble, etc) to cater to these workloads.

### User Experience

**How users will use this feature:**
For more details please reference the RFC: https://github.com/apache/hudi/pull/13924/files#diff-f05ae69c4f41edc32aabfbfc016a12ad1af72917314844f8ae52671234508c56R37

### Hudi RFC Requirements

**RFC PR link:** (if applicable)
https://github.com/apache/hudi/pull/13924/files#diff-f05ae69c4f41edc32aabfbfc016a12ad1af72917314844f8ae52671234508c56R37

**Why RFC is/isn't needed:**
- Does this change public interfaces/APIs? (Yes/No) Yes
- Does this change storage format? (Yes/No) Yes
- Justification:

We will be incrementally making changes to the storage format, there are two other prerequisite RFCs, one around introducing a new type system [RFC-99](https://github.com/apache/hudi/pull/13743/files#diff-578d129aa7ddaddc5fac3c89de3d753f18419f85d96dd8281e91047e3ce49465), and the other introducing the notion of a Column Group in Hudi [RFC-80](https://github.com/apache/hudi/blob/master/rfc/rfc-80/rfc-80.md)

Github Discussion here: https://github.com/apache/hudi/discussions/14128#discussion-9059067

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