A broad documentation pass across the areas LanceDB Enterprise and Embedded diverge on most: **Data Curation** -- GPU Function execution, Slurm scheduling (and what Slurm is, for readers new to it), blob late materialization as its own page, joins, aggregation/profiling, sampling, near-duplicate detection, chunking, distributed shuffle, and IVF-partition clustering. **Feature Engineering** -- computed columns and materialized views, restructured to lead with the Function-based path and show the SQL form side by side with Python throughout; a single Auto Refresh page instead of duplicating scheduling details on every refresh page; adaptive execution; checkpointing; GPU and Slurm placement for refresh workers; a Training Cache page for the PyTorch data loader's automatic cache benefit. **Security & Governance** -- an Audit Log reference (schema, access, grants), Secrets promoted to an ordinary catalog object with their own SQL DDL and a vending/rotation guide, and privilege-table fixes verified against the authorization source. **Deployment & Maintenance** -- Horizontal Scaling and OpenTelemetry moved into a real Deployment area; Automated Cleanup folded into Intelligent Auto-Maintenance (every other maintenance decision already lived there); RTE Compaction and Advanced Conflict Resolution documented in depth. **Landing page** -- the Enterprise feature comparison table reorganized (several redundant or stale rows removed, several new areas added), and the "why Enterprise" bullets replaced with ones tied to a concrete page (Performance, Scale, Fault tolerance, Multicloud deployment, Simplify operations) instead of vague promises. Plus a full pass addressing lancedb-gatekeeper's review: a real test-safety bug (a quickstart test could silently overwrite and delete a deployment's own `frames` table), a fabricated SQL statement with no backing implementation, an actual dedup-guarantee bug in `take_row_ids`, and dozens of documentation-accuracy fixes verified against source rather than taken on faith -- each either fixed, or left with an explicit note on why it needs a feature or deployment owner's sign-off instead of being guessed at. 🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) https://claude.ai/code/session_018PXMCbRH6i5w47TsjeEUMT --------- Co-authored-by: Claude Sonnet 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