LanceDB runs on object storage with low-latency random access. You get the performance — without costs that scale linearly with your data.
ClickHouse is an analytics powerhouse. But vector search is a serving workload, not an analytics workload. Use ClickHouse for analysis, LanceDB for real-time retrieval with native hybrid search.
| ClickHouse | LanceDB | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost at scale | RAM-bound — costs grow with data | Object storage with low-latency random access. Up to 100x savings. |
| Scale | Limited public benchmarks | 20 PB largest table. 20K+ QPS. Netflix, Uber, Exa in production. |
| Data Handling | Vectors only — raw data lives elsewhere | Raw data, embeddings, and features in one table |
| Workloads | Search only | Search, analytics, feature engineering, training |
Trino is a query engine, not a storage format. LanceDB's Lance format is optimized for the fast random access that vector search requires. Query Lance tables through Trino.
| Trino | LanceDB | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost at scale | RAM-bound — costs grow with data | Object storage with low-latency random access. Up to 100x savings. |
| Scale | Limited public benchmarks | 20 PB largest table. 20K+ QPS. Netflix, Uber, Exa in production. |
| Data Handling | Vectors only — raw data lives elsewhere | Raw data, embeddings, and features in one table |
| Workloads | Search only | Search, analytics, feature engineering, training |
DuckDB is fantastic for local analytics. LanceDB has the same embedded simplicity, but scales to production — cloud storage, distributed queries, billions of vectors, native hybrid search.
| DuckDB | LanceDB | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost at scale | RAM-bound — costs grow with data | Object storage with low-latency random access. Up to 100x savings. |
| Scale | Limited public benchmarks | 20 PB largest table. 20K+ QPS. Netflix, Uber, Exa in production. |
| Data Handling | Vectors only — raw data lives elsewhere | Raw data, embeddings, and features in one table |
| Workloads | Search only | Search, analytics, feature engineering, training |
Validate your architecture with a team that understands enterprise scale.