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.
OSS docs now own the full usage content for features that only run against
an Enterprise deployment, since the client interface itself lives here;
Enterprise docs keep only the parts specific to its own behavior. Sophon's
overlay for these five pages is dropped since the OSS versions are now the
complete reference.
SQL Reference is restructured to match an object-type SQL manual (DDL by
object, then DML, then DQL, then Expressions) instead of the old flat,
loosely-ordered page list, absorbing the SQL client-connection guide and
FTS-via-SQL examples into it.
The tab now runs write, read, curate, derive, train before it reaches the
management side: Ingestion, Semantic Search, Data Curation, Feature Engineering,
Training, then Management and Operations. Indexing joins Operations, where the
index maintenance page already was, and gains it as Build & Repair.
Ingestion gains a Create Table page. It was a section inside the overview, so
the one thing a new reader needs first was the one thing the sidebar did not
show.
Data Curation is new: Aggregate, Sampling, Join, Windowing. The SQL reference
answers what the syntax is; these answer why you would reach for it, framed as
the questions curation actually asks -- what do I have, what can I afford, what
else do I know, which one do I keep. Each links to the reference for the
complete grammar rather than repeating it.
They carry the things a reference page would not: that count(*) minus count(col)
is your coverage, that sampling both sides of a join gives a percent rather than
ten, that a window ordered by a value you recompute moves rows between train and
test, and that a one percent sample tells you about the head and nothing about
the tail.
Jack Ye