Files
lancedb/docs
Jack Ye 29691719fa feat: manage property graphs defined over tables
Replaces #4322, keeping only its property graph defined over tables.

A property graph maps node labels and relationship types to existing tables of its namespace, in the shape of SQL/PGQ's `CREATE PROPERTY GRAPH`. It stores only that definition: a query reads the tables as nodes and edges through SQL `GRAPH_TABLE`, as they are when it runs.

- **Rust:** `Connection::create_property_graph` takes a `PropertyGraphDefinition` of `NodeTable`s and `EdgeTable`s. `describe_property_graph`, `drop_property_graph` and `list_property_graphs` manage it.
- **Python:** `lancedb.graph` has `NodeTable`, `EdgeTable` and `Endpoint`. Sync and async connections gain `create_property_graph`, `open_property_graph`, `drop_property_graph` and `list_property_graphs`, and a `PropertyGraph` handle describes its graph.
- **Support:** remote connections only. Local connections raise `NotImplementedError` in Python and return `NotSupported` in Rust.

```python
import lancedb
from lancedb.graph import EdgeTable, Endpoint, NodeTable

db = lancedb.connect("db://demo", api_key="...")
db.create_property_graph(
    "social",
    nodes=[NodeTable("person", key="person_id", label="Person")],
    edges=[
        EdgeTable(
            "knows",
            label="KNOWS",
            source=Endpoint("src_id", references=("person", "person_id")),
            destination=Endpoint("dst_id", references=("person", "person_id")),
        )
    ],
)
db.execute_query("""
    SELECT * FROM GRAPH_TABLE (social
        MATCH (p:Person)-[:KNOWS]->(f:Person) WHERE p.age > 30
        COLUMNS (p.name AS person, f.name AS friend))
""").read_all()
```
2026-10-31 08:25:06 +08:00
..

LanceDB Documentation

For website guides in docs/web, start with Documentation in CONTRIBUTING.md. That covers editing pages, generated examples, previews, availability and drafts.

This page covers the SDK reference in docs/src, built with MkDocs. Its GitHub Actions workflow builds and deploys on pushes to main, so it can include unreleased APIs. That is separate from the release editions of the Mintlify website.

Building the docs

Setup

  1. Install LanceDB Python. See setup in Python contributing guide. Run make develop to install the Python package.
  2. Install documentation dependencies. From LanceDB repo root: pip install -r docs/requirements.txt

Preview the docs

Run these commands from the LanceDB repository root. The subshell changes into docs to load mkdocs.yml, while leaving your shell in the repository root.

(cd docs && PYTHONPATH=. mkdocs serve)

If you want to just generate the HTML files:

(cd docs && PYTHONPATH=. mkdocs build)

If successful, you should see a docs/site directory in the repository root that you can verify locally.

Adding examples

To make sure examples are correct, we put examples in test files so they can be run as part of our test suites.

You can see the tests are at:

  • Python: python/python/tests/docs
  • Typescript: nodejs/examples/

Checking python examples

cd python
pytest -vv python/tests/docs

Checking typescript examples

The examples depend on @lancedb/lancedb at file:../dist, so the package must be built before running the tests. This uses pnpm; see the Typescript contributing guide for the toolchain setup.

pushd nodejs
pnpm install
pnpm build
popd

Then you can run the examples by going to the nodejs/examples directory, which is a separate pnpm package with its own lockfile:

pushd nodejs/examples
pnpm install
pnpm test
popd

API documentation

Python

The Python API documentation is organized based on the file docs/src/python/python.md. We manually add entries there so we can control the organization of the reference page. However, this means any new types must be manually added to the file. No additional steps are needed to generate the API documentation.

Typescript

The typescript API documentation is generated from the typescript source code using typedoc.

When new APIs are added, you must manually re-run the typedoc command to update the API documentation. The new files should be checked into the repository.

pushd nodejs
# `pnpm docs` would invoke pnpm's built-in `docs` command, not the script.
pnpm run docs
popd