Ten merges and renames, all in one direction: fewer pages, each covering a whole
subject.
Table absorbs schema evolution and versioning. Vector search absorbs
multi-vector. Explain absorbs explain analyze. Reranking was seven pages -- an
overview and six rerankers of a few dozen lines each -- and is now one. The
vector index page absorbs quantization, which was only ever a parameter of it.
Indexing moves to Manage, where the other catalog objects are. The operational
half stays in Operate as one Indexing page, absorbing GPU indexing -- which was
filed in sophon despite importing lancedb's snippets and being mostly
open-source content with one Enterprise-badged section.
Performance was a single page aggregating tips for four unrelated operations,
which is hard to keep current. Each section now sits with the operation it is
about: ingestion tips on Insert, index tips on Indexing, compaction tips on
Compaction, query tips on Search.
Data Types leaves Concepts. The type reference belongs in the SQL reference,
which already described the same types from the query side; Table now carries a
short summary that points there. The multimodal material it had absorbed is its
own page again, since storing blobs is a task rather than a type definition.
Query becomes Semantic Search, Branches becomes Branch, and the Enterprise
Security page becomes Compliance.
Redirects cover every moved URL, and 30 files were repointed at the merged
anchors.
Feature engineering is now the overview plus one page per operation: add a
computed column, refresh a column, refresh a materialized view. Computed
columns covered declaring and filling on one page, which are separate decisions
with separate failure modes.
Functions move to Management, where the other catalog objects are, and absorb
the environment-mismatch guidance from the Enterprise page -- a symptom table
worth having beside the parameters that cause it.
The Enterprise feature-engineering page is merged into the overview. Two of its
claims were stale: create_materialized_view is implemented for db:// connections
in remote/db.py, so views are not local-only, and the tier is Enterprise rather
than 'Cloud and Enterprise'.
The REST reference leaves the sidebar. Mintlify only generates per-endpoint
pages from a navigation group -- hidden, dropdowns, global anchors and a
top-level openapi key were all tried -- so removing the group removes those
pages. The overview survives as an unlisted page, linked from SDKs & SQL, and
the spec still ships for anything that wants to read it directly.
The tab opened on Quickstart, buried "What is LanceDB?" inside it, and put
everything else under a single Guides group that had to be expanded before any
section was reachable. Model training sat outside it for no reason.
Reorganize around what a user does, in order: Introduction, Catalog, Ingestion,
Search, Feature engineering, Training, Maintenance, SQL. Guides is gone as a
level, so each section is one click.
New pages: catalog overview and database, and a compaction page under
Maintenance. tables/update covered four separate operations, so it becomes the
Ingestion section — insert, merge insert, update, delete — with insert drawing
on the large-dataset material from tables/create. Its old URL redirects.
Agentic skills move to their own tab after API Reference.
Jack Ye