Lei XuandClaude Sonnet 5.5
bedb6ab3b1
## Summary - Rework `docs/web/training/torch.mdx` for people who already know the PyTorch `DataLoader`, built around `lancedb.streaming.StreamingDataset`. - The quickstart trains a state-to-action policy on the real `lance-format/lerobot-xvla-soft-fold` dataset loaded via `hf://`, using a zero-copy Arrow-to-tensor transform. - Add a short table mapping PyTorch idioms (`IterableDataset`, `DistributedSampler`, `collate_fn`, `random_split`, `StatefulDataLoader`) to their LanceDB equivalents. - Add an Optimizations section: Transform (including an `ExtractFrames` example using blob v2 and torchcodec), Distributed Training, and the existing Output Formats content moved underneath. ## Notes - The quickstart depends on #4602 (permutation building over tables with schema metadata), which is merged. - `ExtractFrames` takes a URI and opens the table lazily because a local `LanceTable` cannot yet be pickled into DataLoader workers. - The Permutation-based "Selecting columns" and "Using multiple DataLoader workers" sections further down are unchanged from main. ## Test plan - [x] Ran the quickstart, transform, `ExtractFrames` (main process and forkserver workers) and distributed snippets locally. - [x] Rendered the page with `mint dev` and checked for console errors. 🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) --------- Co-authored-by: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <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