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Allow issue vector search in batch mode #876
Description
Problem Statement
Instead of query one vector a time, allows user to issue multiple queries in the same request, exposing more opportunity for internal parallisms.
enable vector searching for a batch of queries. Currently Lance only allows 1D queries, but allowing 2D queries (parallelized) would be useful.
Use case #1 is: at query time to run multiple simultaneous queries 'around' the root query to diversify search results, and #2 is useful for ETL operations (like the above deduplication)
Agree it would be amazing that lance support this api directly to minimize read requests to object store. Recent work to cache the index already helps
Activity
trueutkarsh commentedon Jul 5, 2023
Hi @eddyxu,
I have a few doubts regarding this problem which I wanted to discuss with you. With multiple queries instead of one
Thanks
tullie commentedon Aug 16, 2023
Curious if there's any ETA for solving this? cc @trueutkarsh, @eddyxu, @changhiskhan. At the moment, we have to make many batch queries (batch_size=500) to lance, and this is a huge bottleneck for us.
sadykovIsmail commentedon Jun 9, 2026
Hi everyone, @eddyxu I'd love to take a stab at implementing this! I've been doing a lot of work with vector databases and RAG pipelines in Python, and adding a batch query API would be a massive performance boost for the dataflows I usually build.
I'm going to start digging into how the 1D queries are currently handled. Since I'll be coming at this primarily from the Python side, could anyone point me to the best place to start looking within the Python bindings and how they currently map to the underlying Rust execution plan for queries?
Also, if possible, could you please assign this issue to me so others know I am working on it? Thanks!
Xuanwo commentedon Jul 28, 2026
Closing as completed. Python batch vector search now accepts multiple query vectors and returns
query_index; tests verify equivalence with repeated single-vector queries.