Dan RammerandClaude Opus 5.5
92825f6f13
## What Renames the user-facing MemWAL surface to **RTE** (realtime engine) across Rust, Python, TypeScript, and Java, including the REST wire format. This follows the LSM → MemWAL rename in #4075. | Before | After | |---|---| | `MemWalWriteSpec` / `MemWalStats` | `RTEWriteSpec` / `RTEStats` | | `enable_memwal` / `disable_memwal` / `get_memwal_spec` | `enable_rte` / `disable_rte` / `get_rte_spec` | | `flush_memwal` / `compact_memwal` / `checkpoint_memwal` | `flush_rte` / `compact_rte` / `checkpoint_rte` | | `get_memwal_stats` / `close_memwal_writers` | `get_rte_stats` / `close_rte_writers` | | `use_memwal` (query, merge insert) | `use_rte` | | TS/Java `enableMemWal`, `useMemWal`, ... | `enableRTE`, `useRTE`, ... (napi `js_name` set explicitly) | | Java `LanceDbTableMemWal` | `LanceDbTableRTE` | | `table/memwal_stats.rs` | `table/rte_stats.rs` | Docs and comments now say "realtime engine (RTE)". Text about Lance's underlying mechanism keeps "MemWAL" ("Lance's MemWAL", "MemWAL index"). **Left alone:** Lance-owned names (`MemWalIndexDetails`, `DatasetMemWalExt`, `InitializeMemWal*`, `mem_wal` paths), internal `Lsm*` names and modules, and the `does not support with_row_id` refusal text that the hybrid fallback matches on. ## Compatibility Breaking, for an experimental API. The wire format changes, so this must roll out together with the matching sophon change (lancedb/sophon#8870): - Routes: `/enable_memwal/` → `/enable_rte/`, `/disable_memwal/` → `/disable_rte/`, `/get_memwal_spec/` → `/get_rte_spec/`, `/get_memwal_stats/` → `/get_rte_stats/`, `/flush_memwal/` → `/flush_rte/`, `/compact_memwal/` → `/compact_rte/` - Response keys: `memwal_spec` → `rte_spec`, `memwal_stats` → `rte_stats` - Request field: `use_memwal` → `use_rte` on query and merge-insert bodies The SQL keyword becomes `ALTER TABLE ... SET RTE` server-side. The guides under `docs/web` will be updated separately. ## Validation - Rust: `cargo clippy --features remote --tests --examples` clean; `cargo test --features remote -p lancedb --lib`: 1533 passed - Java: `mvn test`: 37 passed (Spotless applied with JDK 11) - Python: `ruff format` / `ruff check` clean; targeted tests (`test_rte_spec`, `test_merge_insert_lsm`, `test_remote_db`, `test_wal_hybrid`, `test_query`, `test_permutation`, `test_table`): 708 passed - TypeScript: `pnpm build`; `table`, `query` tests: 606 passed; `biome check` clean; `docs/src/js` regenerated with `pnpm run docs` 🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) --------- Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
LanceDB Documentation
LanceDB docs are available at docs.lancedb.com.
The SDK docs are built and deployed automatically by Github Actions
whenever a commit is pushed to the main branch. So it is possible for the docs to show
unreleased features.
Building the docs
Setup
- Install LanceDB Python. See setup in Python contributing guide.
Run
make developto install the Python package. - 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