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.
The function catalogue is now real rather than a pointer. Scalar functions are
listed by taxonomy -- math, string, unicode, regex, date/time, array, map,
struct, crypto, type -- and the names come from what datafusion-functions 54
actually registers, not from what DataFusion documents on main. Aggregate and
window pages gain the same treatment.
Two things the audit corrected rather than copied.
SHOW TABLES does not work. DataFusion implements it over information_schema,
which this session does not enable, so it fails at plan time. It was documented
as working here, on the SHOW page and in three Manage tables; all four are
fixed, and the SQL overview now lists the absence alongside SHOW COLUMNS.
Prepared statements are a Flight SQL protocol feature, not a PREPARE statement.
A script carrying PREPARE ... AS SELECT will not run, while the same intent
expressed through a client will. The new page says so rather than copying
DataFusion's syntax.
Every section of the Documentation tab that has a SQL counterpart now links to
it -- 27 of 76 non-SQL pages, each pointing at the specific statement rather
than at the reference index.
Namespace and Table were the only objects behind a nested group. Both are now a
single page like Database, Materialized view, View and Function, so Manage is a
flat list of the things a catalog holds.
Namespace merges its two pages, which were a concept page and a usage page for
the same object.
Table is a new page. The old tables/index was a 672-line basic-usage tutorial
whose every section had acquired a better home during the restructure --
connecting, ingesting, searching, filtering, adding and dropping columns -- to
the point that its own Next steps cards pointed at the pages that superseded it.
It is replaced by a table object page: what a table carries, create, open, list,
rename, clone, drop, and links out.
Schema evolution, versioning and branching stay as siblings rather than folding
in. Merging them would have made one 1,800-line page, which is not what the
other object pages look like.
SELECT and Enterprise SQL sat apart in Query while documenting the same engine.
They are now one SQL group: overview, Select, Aggregation, Join, Window,
Sampling, Functions -- one page per construct, with the Enterprise client-setup
and FTS pages merged in rather than parallel to them.
Sampling is new. TABLESAMPLE is implemented and was undocumented: BERNOULLI
picks rows, SYSTEM picks Lance fragments, REPEATABLE fixes the draw so a sample
works as a stable evaluation set. Its refusals are documented too -- a
percentage over 100, a fractional row count, BUCKET, the SAMPLE spelling and
the OFFSET modifier are all errors, because a sampling clause that were read and
not applied would be a wrong answer rather than a missing feature.
Schema & Data Types is one page again, with the multimodal content merged into
its blob section rather than sitting beside it.
Agentic Skills stops being a tab. Both its pages are tutorials, so they join the
Tutorials tab; the Basics page that introduces them stays.
Jack Ye