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As your table organization needs grow over time and your projects become more complex, you can use namespaces to organize your tables in a way that reflects your business domains, teams, or environments. As described in the Namespaces and Catalog Model section, namespaces are LanceDB’s way of generalizing catalog specs, providing developers a clean way to manage hierarchical organization of tables in the catalog. The SDKs treat a namespace as a path and can use it for table resolution when you use LanceDB outside the root namespace.

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Table operations with namespace paths

Let’s imagine a scenario where your table management needs have evolved, and you now have the following multi-level structure to organize your tables outside the root namespace. 
./local_lancedb (root)
└── prod
    └── search
        └── user   (table)
            └── data   (table)
    └── recommendations
        └── user   (table)
            └── data   (data)
Below, we show how you would express table operations within that namespace. Each item in the namespace list (["prod", "search"]) represents a level in the namespace hierarchy, and the table name is specified when you create, open, list, or drop it. The SDK methods expose the namespace path in the idiom of each language:
  • Python: pass namespace_path=["prod", "search"] to table operations.
  • Rust: call builder methods such as .namespace(vec!["prod".to_string(), "search".to_string()]).
  • TypeScript: pass a namespacePath array, for example await db.openTable("user", ["prod", "search"]).
Using namespaces is optional in LanceDB, and most basic use cases do not require to work with them. An empty namespace ([]), which is the default, means “root namespace”, and the data will be stored in the data/ directory under the specified root path.

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Namespace management APIs

You can open/create/drop tables inside a namespace path (like ["prod", "search"]). All three SDKs expose namespace lifecycle operations directly. In Python, use lancedb.connect_namespace(...) when calling namespace lifecycle methods such as create_namespace, list_namespaces, describe_namespace, and drop_namespace. In TypeScript, use lancedb.connectNamespace(...) and call createNamespace, listNamespaces, describeNamespace, and dropNamespace on the returned Connection. In Rust, use lancedb::connect_namespace(...) and call create_namespace, list_namespaces, and drop_namespace. Namespace creation and deletion have modes that control what happens when the target already exists, doesn’t exist, or contains data:
  • Create mode: create fails if the namespace already exists, exist_ok keeps the existing namespace, and overwrite replaces it.
  • Drop mode: fail reports an error when the namespace doesn’t exist, and skip treats a missing namespace as a successful no-op.
  • Drop behavior: restrict keeps non-empty namespaces from being dropped, and cascade drops child namespaces and tables first.
Namespace path components can’t be empty. Each component can contain only letters, numbers, underscores, hyphens, and periods.

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Namespaces in LanceDB Enterprise

In LanceDB Enterprise deployments, configure namespace-backed federated databases in a TOML file under your deployment’s config directory. LanceDB Enterprise supports both directory-based (ns_impl = "dir") and REST-based (ns_impl = "rest") namespace implementations. The example below shows how to configure a directory-based namespace implementation in LanceDB Enterprise. 
# Federated database configuration for DirectoryNamespace
# This example uses minio storage
[federated_dbs.federated_dir_test]
ns_impl = "dir"
root = "s3://<your-deployment>/<your-dir>"
"storage.region" = "us-east-1"
"storage.endpoint" = "http://localhost:9000"
"storage.access_key_id" = "minioadmin"
"storage.secret_access_key" = "minioadmin"
"storage.allow_http" = "true"
# Far future expiration (year 2100)
"storage.expires_at_millis" = "4102444800000"
The example above uses MinIO, but the same approach applies to other cloud object storage platforms based on your deployment. For REST-based namespace servers, you can specify the namespace implementation as "rest" with forwarding prefixed headers for authentication and context propagation. 
[federated_dbs.federated_rest_test]
ns_impl = "rest"
uri = "http://<your_org>.internal.catalog.com"
forward_header_prefixes = ["X-forward"]
With forward_header_prefixes = ["X-forward"], any incoming header starting with X-forward is forwarded to http://<your_org>.internal.catalog.com. This is useful for auth propagation, for example sending X-forward-authorization: Bearer xxxx. For the LanceDB REST API itself, requests use x-api-key for API-key authentication. If your endpoint serves more than one database, LanceDB can also use headers such as x-lancedb-database or x-lancedb-database-prefix to route the request to the right database context.