Will JonesandClaude Opus 5.5
4d7a64712f
## Summary Adopts the product terminology guide across the docs site pages, SDK docstrings and error messages. "LanceDB OSS" and local mode become **LanceDB Embedded**. "Remote" as the execution model becomes **LanceDB Distributed**, which LanceDB Enterprise provides. Where free vs paid is the point, pages contrast "LanceDB Embedded (open source)" with "LanceDB Enterprise". This is a first trial of the Embedded name, so reviewers can judge it in context. - **Embedded vs Distributed** for where execution runs (`optimize()`, consistency, branching, maintenance). Main pages define it once: "LanceDB Enterprise runs LanceDB Distributed: …" - **LanceDB Cloud** is kept only for legacy-Cloud specifics (`db://` region, the brute-force KNN limit) and marked legacy. "Cloud and Enterprise" becomes Enterprise or Distributed. - **Plan executor** becomes "executor" or the fleet name. - **Error messages** change, e.g. `optimize is not supported for remote tables.` → `... in LanceDB Distributed.` Tests that match on them are updated. - **Vale rules** (`EmbeddedName`, `OSSProduct`, `RemoteExecution`, `DistributedEnterprise`, `LegacyCloud`, `InternalNames`) enforce the terms in prose. Unchanged: identifiers (`availability.oss`, the `remote` module and feature, `RemoteTable`, `db://`), heading anchors, internal code comments, and Geneva. ## Evidence - Rust lib tests for the changed messages and the Python tests in `test_remote_db.py`, `test_materialized_views.py` and `test_table.py` pass locally. - Not run locally: - The Node tests: `remote.test.ts` and `table.test.ts` have updated assertions. - Vale. - The `experimental_functions`-marked materialized-view tests. - `docs/src` API reference was hand-edited to match the docstrings rather than regenerated. ## Merge Risk **Door:** two-way; prose and message text only. **Blast Radius:** `docs`, `error-messages`: callers matching on old error strings would break. Companion PRs: lancedb/docs (assembler labels, STYLE.md) and sophon (Enterprise pages). 🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) --------- Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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
- 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