Porting the upstream changes replaced snippets/indexing.mdx with a hand
copy from lancedb/docs, which dropped six exports the vector-index page
still imports (`mint validate` warns on each) and added
PyQuantizationCustomParams, which had no source here.
The quantization test region is ported from lancedb/docs and the module
is regenerated, so every export comes from a test again. The regenerated
PyQuantizationCustomParams matches the copy byte for byte. Also fixes
"convetion" and "entires" on the page.
FAQ content is redistributed into the pages it actually belongs to: license
and Parquet-comparison notes into the Lance format page, scale guidance into
Architecture, index-necessity and refine_factor guidance into the vector
index page, the multiprocessing/fork gotcha into SDKs and SQL, and the
weak-consistency recommendation into Consistency. General query-performance
issues are dropped since Explain and Explain Analyze already cover that
ground.
The new Support page under Deployment carries the OSS Discord and Enterprise
support-email channels that used to live in Troubleshooting.
Indexing loses its wrapper group -- Overview, Vector Index, FTS Index, Scalar
Index and Build & Repair sit directly in Maintenance now, followed by
Compaction, Cleanup and Background Jobs at the same level.
Cleanup is new, split out of Compaction: pruning old versions is a distinct
Enterprise job (cleanup) from merging files (compact), even though optimize()
in OSS bundles both into one call. The retention, disk-usage and
failed-transaction material that used to live under Compaction's umbrella
moves with it.
Background Jobs is new and covers what nothing else does: the job types a
deployment runs on its own -- WAL/SPFresh maintenance, cache prewarming,
registry archiving and metering export, and the object-teardown job that
follows a namespace or view drop. Every entry is grounded against the
job-coordinator's public job_type constants, not the internal two-letter wire
codes used for registry storage. Five existing pages (Build & Repair, Table,
Function, Column Refresh, Materialized View Refresh) gain a one-line job-type
note rather than duplicating a page for job types they already document.
Storage folds into Deployment: storage/index (choosing a backend) and
storage/configuration (configuring one) merge into a single Storage page --
they never overlapped, one is the decision and one is the how-to -- and move
under Deployment along with Monitoring. Cloud Providers loses its nesting;
its two pages plus Azure sit flat, and the former Overview is retitled
Deployment Models so it doesn't collide with the group's own Overview entry.
Redirects cover every moved URL.
deploy-freeze is the branch currently serving the site, and it moved eight
commits while this work was in flight. Six carried content:
#359 LeRobot loader table replaced with same-batches measurements
#360contact@lancedb.com replaced with the contact page
#363 redirect for the legacy /core/update URL
#364 Stanford Cars source link
#365 cherry-pick of the data-loading rewrite, already ported from main
#366 opt-in cookie consent banner, gating RB2B
Each landed in its new location rather than its old one: the contact link
appears in pages that now live in two repositories, /core/update points at
/ingestion/update, and the consent script is site chrome so it ships with the
base navigation.
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.
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.
Six groups were verbs -- Manage, Ingest, Train, Operate, Secure, Deploy -- and
now name the thing rather than the action. Four more were sentence case.
The page labels that were verb phrases follow: Add Computed Column becomes
Computed Columns, Refresh Column becomes Column Refresh, Configuring Storage
becomes Configuration, and Explain becomes Query Plans, which is also more
accurate now that the page covers analyze as well.
SQL statement pages take the keyword -- SELECT, DDL, DML, REFRESH, SHOW, EXPLAIN
-- because a statement name is a noun and lowercase Select and Show read as
instructions. Concept pages there keep noun phrases: Joins, Window Functions,
Subqueries, Operators.
Two duplicate labels are resolved on the way. Reranking sat in Semantic Search
labelled Overview despite being the only page on its subject, and the Enterprise
client page sat in SQL Reference labelled SQL next to the reference Overview; it
is Client Connection now.
Title case leaves prepositions and articles lowercase, so Needle in a Haystack
and Hybrid Search on BEIR are already correct and unchanged.
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.
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.
Brendan Clement
Jack Ye