lancedb now holds a page at every path the site publishes, including the twelve
Enterprise ones. Those are real open-source pages -- what the capability is, and
what the embedded form does instead -- rather than blank placeholders, so the
open-source site is complete on its own. sophon becomes an overlay whose page
replaces the one at the same path, which means navigation lives in one place and
the two repositories only have to agree on a path.
That removes the whole class of problem where a page could only be reached from
one of the two trees. The open-source site went from twenty-four dangling
Enterprise links to one, and that one points at the dataset pages the build
repository owns.
Ports four changes that landed on the docs repository after this branch left it:
#344 indexing and quantization rewritten
#354 LeRobot native reader
#361 training/index renamed to training/data-loading and rewritten
#362 distance metric mismatch falls back to a brute-force scan
None applied as patches, because these files were merged or split here --
quantization into the vector index page, multi-vector into vector search,
performance into four pages. Each was ported by taking the upstream page and
re-applying the restructure on top, which also picked up a correction that would
otherwise have been lost: the stricter brute-force threshold for multi-vector
columns is a Cloud limit, not an Enterprise one.
The upstream LeRobot page linked to a Geneva page that no longer exists; it now
points at the feature-engineering pages that replaced it.
Multimodal Data becomes a section of Table, between Data types -- which
introduces blobs -- and Schema evolution.
The rest is link repair. Earlier merges left links pointing at pages that had
moved, which the redirect table covered but the link checker does not follow,
so they were broken in the rendered site: /catalog, /lance, /namespaces,
/tables-and-namespaces, /search/multivector-search, /search/explain-analyze and
/basics/data-types#blob.
The redirect table itself had two conflicting entries for /tables/multimodal and
four pointing at reranking pages that no longer exist; both are fixed.
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.
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.
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.
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 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