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.
Both tabs held one group of the same name as the tab, so every entry sat a level
deeper than it needed to and the group heading said nothing the tab had not
already said. The overview now sits above the real groups, which the tab can do
once it uses pages rather than groups.
Demos has no categories at all, so its four pages are simply flat.
The embedding overview is renamed from Overview, which would otherwise have been
the second entry with that label in the same sidebar.
The three gallery pages held thirteen examples as rows in a table, reachable
only by opening the gallery first. Each is now its own page, so the sidebar
lists them and search finds them by name.
A page for an example that lives in vectordb-recipes says so and links to the
notebook and its source, rather than pretending the tutorial is here.
Overview moves above the groups -- the tab uses pages rather than groups, which
is what allows an entry to sit outside every group. Stable World Model joins
Training, since that is what it is doing. The agent plugin page is now Using
LanceDB Agent Skill.
Mintlify cannot link outward from a sidebar: an {anchor, href} entry is ignored
and a bare URL renders with its scheme mangled to a single slash, so a real page
per example is the only way to list them.
The tab is Use Cases now, grouped General, Search, RAG, Feature Engineering,
Training, World Models -- one page per example, named for the example rather
than for its position in a tree.
The gallery pages that listed external notebooks become the More Examples entry
of the category they belong to, instead of standing in front of the real
tutorials. The top-level overview stops linking to itself through three levels
of index page and names the categories directly.
Branch experiments move to Feature Engineering, which is what they are an
experiment in. The agent plugin leads General, since it applies to everything
else in the tab.
LeRobotDataset moves to the Datasets tab, where the LeRobot datasets already
are, and Robotics moves to the top of that tab.
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.
Basics gains a Schema & Data Types section -- the Arrow types a table can hold,
the extension types Lance adds on top (lance.json, lance.blob.v2,
lance.bfloat16), and where geospatial actually stands. The multimodal page moves
in beside it. Consistency joins Basics too, after Query & Job.
Query & Job now leads with the thing the _async convention actually gives you: a
handle. execute_query_async returns a query, everything else returns a job, and
both answer the same four questions -- which one, how is it going, give me the
result, stop. Only the third differs, because a query produces rows to stream
and a job produces an outcome to wait for.
Management gains a Materialized View page. Creating one was documented only on
the refresh page, and the stable-row-ids requirement is a creation-time
decision that cannot be undone.
Embeddings move to Integrations as the Embedding Registry, which is what they
are -- a client-side feature that wraps provider models, sitting above the
providers it registers.
The demo gallery was three apps on one page; it is now three pages. Use Cases
folds into Tutorials as Tutorials and Use Cases.
Versioning and branching are properties of a table, not steps in getting data
in, so they join the Table group. Consistency stays with Ingestion, where the
question it answers -- when do other writers' rows become visible -- is asked.
The Ingesting Data page was in the Table group while an Ingestion overview
existed separately, so the two are merged. The large-dataset section was
duplicated between it and the insert page; the insert page keeps it.
Schema and Data Evolution covered two different things under one title.
Changing a table's shape stays in Table management; deriving values from data
already there becomes a Feature engineering page, next to computed columns and
functions, which are the same job at larger scale.
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.
Basics now reads outward from the format: Lance Format, Lakehouse & Catalog,
Query & Job, SDKs & SQL, Agentic Skills.
Jobs becomes Query & Job. Async means two unrelated things here -- whether your
thread blocks, and whether the work outlives the call -- and nothing said so.
The API Reference tab is gone. Its SDK index is folded into SDKs & SQL, where
the surfaces are already compared; the generated REST pages move into Basics
beside it.
Connecting was described in passing on the catalog page. It is now a Management
page covering the URI forms and what each changes, deployment options, storage
options, and read consistency, since which one you pass decides what exists.
Quickstart ran out at multimodal storage. It now continues through a computed
column and its refresh into a PyTorch loader, which is the arc the rest of the
docs assume.
The Documentation tab now reads as a manual over Python, TypeScript and SQL
rather than a Python guide with SQL bolted on.
Basics replaces the Catalog section: what the catalog holds, what each API
surface can do, jobs, agentic skills, and what Lance is. Management is new and
is the CRUD and listing reference for every catalog object, with a column per
language so the gaps are visible -- TypeScript has no function or SQL methods,
SQL needs a deployment.
Search becomes Query and gains a SELECT reference, since an analytical query is
a query whether it came from a builder or a statement.
Jobs is new. Every long-running operation already returned the same handle from
an _async method; nothing documented it.
The SQL function reference gains what Lance registers on top of DataFusion:
contains_tokens, backed by the FTS index, and the JSON accessors, backed by a
JSON scalar index. Geospatial st_* functions are behind a build feature LanceDB
does not ship, which is now stated rather than left to a confusing error.
Removes the Geneva pages' orphaned snippets, merges FTS Examples into Full-Text
Search, and splits Query Optimization into Explain and Explain Analyze.
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.
DataFrame support is not going ahead, so the pages documenting it come out:
the relational operations and the expression system, both of which described
only that API.
The manual was framed around having two query surfaces and choosing between
them. With one, that framing is gone — the overview now leads with SQL over
Arrow Flight SQL and what the dialect is, rather than with a comparison to
something that will not exist.
The function reference keeps everything that was about SQL: the DataFusion
version, how Lance columns map onto its type system, the pseudo-columns, blob
handling, and `fts()`. Only the section on reaching functions through the
Python wrapper is replaced, since the wrapper is going too.
Mentions of pandas and polars DataFrames elsewhere in the documentation are
unrelated and untouched.
The manual said the SQL dialect's function and type reference was out of scope.
It is not: the engine is DataFusion 54 with its default function set registered,
so the dialect is documented already and the useful thing is to say which
version and point at it.
The types are worth being concrete about rather than deferring. Lance's
DataFusion table provider returns the dataset's Arrow schema directly — there is
no SQL type layer over storage — so DataFusion's type reference describes Lance
columns exactly, and a vector column is a FixedSizeList that behaves like one.
Two consequences of that mapping are documented because they surprise people.
The pseudo-columns the provider can append are real and typed — `_rowid`,
`_rowaddr` and `_rowoffset` are nullable UInt64, and the nullability is a reused
selection bitmap rather than a missing value, so a null there means nothing.
And a blob column's Arrow type depends on how it is read: descriptions by
default, binary on request, which changes the schema a query sees.
`fts()` is recorded as what it is, a DataFusion TableProvider over the dataset.
That explains the parts that otherwise look arbitrary: why it is a table
function rather than a predicate, why every column of the table is available in
its result, and why projections push into the scan.
Functions and materialized views are objects in the Lance Multimodal Lakehouse,
alongside tables and indexes — created, versioned and refreshed like anything
else in it. The pages introduced them as client methods, which undersold what
they are and left the capability sounding like a helper rather than part of the
storage layer.
The materialized view page also framed Enterprise availability around which
client you are holding. A reader does not care about that; they care whether
views exist where their data lives. They do, refreshed across the cluster, and
the page now says so and points at the Enterprise documentation rather than
implying the feature is missing.
Both the lancedb client and the geneva client expose
`create_materialized_view`, and they are not the same feature. The page said
materialized views are local only, which is true of this client and misleading
for anyone on Enterprise, where views are created through geneva and refreshed
on the cluster.
Found by assembling the combined site and reading the Geneva pages against the
new ones: they described the same call as distributed and Enterprise while this
one described it as raising. Both were accurate about their own client and
neither said which client it meant.
The feature engineering documentation describes the geneva package, a separate
SDK. The capability it covers now lives in this client — materialized views,
computed columns, and registered functions are all shipped API with no pages
describing them.
Four pages cover the three mechanisms and, more usefully, when each applies.
The overview leads with that choice rather than with concepts, because the
mechanisms overlap and picking the wrong one is the expensive mistake.
Two things they say plainly that the API reference cannot:
Declaring and filling are separate everywhere, and filling never revisits a row
it has already done. That makes refreshes idempotent and appends cheap, and it
means a filled value does not track its inputs — surprising if you expect a
spreadsheet, so it is stated rather than left to be discovered.
The availability split runs the opposite way to expectation. Materialized views
are local only and raise on a remote connection; functions are Cloud and
Enterprise only and raise on a local one. Someone reading about both in one
sitting will otherwise assume the usual direction and be wrong in one of them.
Examples are the tested ones from the docstrings, so they cannot drift from the
behaviour they describe.
The training and tutorial pages that pointed into the geneva documentation now
point here.
The README that carried this sat inside docs/web, which is the published site
root, so it would have shipped as a page. Contributor guidance belongs in the
contributing guide, which is also where someone changing behaviour will look for
whether the page describing it is theirs to update.
The pages describing this code lived in lancedb/docs, a repository with ten
stars that neither contributing guide mentioned. A user who hit a wrong page
while reading the source had to find a separate, near-invisible repository to
fix it. These 102 pages now sit beside the code, and a documentation fix is a
pull request in the repository the reader already had open.
`docs/web` is a complete Mintlify site: `cd docs/web && mint dev` serves it with
no other checkout. Enterprise pages stay private and are merged in when the
published site is assembled, so links into them do not resolve here — every
open-source page does.
`docs/web-tests` holds the tests the code examples are extracted from. They ran
against a published wheel before; here they can run against this repository's
own SDK, so an example that stops compiling fails the pull request that broke
it rather than being noticed later.
Both directories sit beside `docs/src` and are invisible to it: mkdocs reads
`docs_dir: src`, so the SDK reference builds and deploys exactly as before.
Jack Ye