SQL now leads with why you'd reach for it beyond analytics: it's served over
Flight SQL, so it's the way in for any language without a native LanceDB SDK,
and broadly every public SDK method has a corresponding SQL statement. Closes
by pointing at the SQL Reference as the spec that defines the precise
behavior behind both the SQL surface and the SDK operations it mirrors.
Moving both into Getting Started (before Agentic Skills) means a reader knows
what the API surface even is before being told how to hand it to an agent.
FAQ content is redistributed into the pages it actually belongs to: license
and Parquet-comparison notes into the Lance format page, scale guidance into
Architecture, index-necessity and refine_factor guidance into the vector
index page, the multiprocessing/fork gotcha into SDKs and SQL, and the
weak-consistency recommendation into Consistency. General query-performance
issues are dropped since Explain and Explain Analyze already cover that
ground.
The new Support page under Deployment carries the OSS Discord and Enterprise
support-email channels that used to live in Troubleshooting.
Every group now answers exactly one question. Get started and Concepts cover
what the system is; the verb groups cover doing something with it; Operate,
Secure and Deploy cover running it; SQL reference is lookup. Maintenance becomes
Operate, Governance becomes Secure, and the rest take verbs to match.
Three new pages in Concepts and Get started:
Guarantees states what a write promises when it returns, which version a reader
sees, what survives a failure, and -- the half usually missing -- what is not
guaranteed: no multi-table transactions, no read-your-writes across processes
without an interval, unenforced primary keys that do not enforce, no background
compaction.
Limits collects bounds that were stated in passing across a dozen pages, with
the numbers verified against the code rather than inferred: name lengths, job
event caps, SHOW ERRORS bounds, the sampling range that is refused rather than
clamped.
Architecture illustrates embedded against distributed as the one deployment
decision, and is written to cover both rather than only Enterprise.
Indexing splits by question. Choosing an index is a Query decision and moves
there; building, repairing and GPU-building it stay in Operate.
SQL becomes a top-level reference of fifteen pages instead of a sub-group of
Query. Auditing sophon-sql turned up a large undocumented surface: ALTER TABLE
ADD COLUMN in its plain, computed and function forms with FILTER, IGNORE NULLS
and OVER modifiers; SET UNENFORCED PRIMARY KEY; SET and UNSET WAL with sharding;
CREATE FUNCTION with its dependency options; REFRESH COLUMN and REFRESH
MATERIALIZED VIEW; and the SHOW family. None of it was written down.
Jack Ye