Skip to main content

29 posts tagged with "release"

Release notes and updates

View All Tags

Spice v1.8.2 (Oct 21, 2025)

· 5 min read
Jack Eadie
Jack Eadie
Token Plumber at Spice AI

Announcing the release of Spice v1.8.2! 🔍

Spice v1.8.2 is a patch release focused on reliability, validation, performance, and bug fixes, with improvements across DuckDB acceleration, S3 Vectors, document tables, and HTTP search.

What's New in v1.8.2​

Support Table Relations in /v1/search HTTP Endpoint​

Spice now supports table relations for the additional_columns and where parameters in the /v1/search endpoint. This enables improved search for multi-dataset use cases, where filters and columns can be used on specific datasets.

Example:

curl 'http://localhost:8090/v1/search' \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -H 'Accept: application/json' -d '{
        "text": "hello world",
        "additional_columns": ["tbl1.foo", "tbl2.bar", "baz"],
        "where": "tbl1.foo > 100000",
        "limit": 5
    }'

In this example, search results from the tbl1 dataset will include columns foo and baz, where foo > 100000. For tbl2, columns bar and baz will be returned.

DuckDB Data Accelerator Table Partitioning & Indexing​

  • Configurable DuckDB Index Scan: DuckDB acceleration now supports configurable duckdb_index_scan_percentage and duckdb_index_scan_max_count parameters, supporting fine-tuning of index scan behavior for improved query performance.

Example:

datasets:
  - from: postgres:my_table
    name: my_table
    acceleration:
      enabled: true
      engine: duckdb
      mode: file
      params:
        # When combined, DuckDB will use an index scan when the number of qualifying rows is less than the maximum of these two thresholds
        duckdb_index_scan_percentage: '0.10' # 10% as decimal
        duckdb_index_scan_max_count: '1000'

  • Hive-Style Partitioning: In file-partitioned mode, the DuckDB data accelerator uses Hive-style partitioning for more efficient file management.

  • Table-Based Partitioning: Spice now supports partitioning DuckDB accelerations within a single file. This approach maintains ACID guarantees for full and append mode refreshes, while optimizing resource usage and improving query performance. Configure via the partition_mode parameter:

datasets:
  - from: file:test_data.parquet
    name: test_data
    params:
      file_format: parquet
    acceleration:
      enabled: true
      engine: duckdb
      mode: file
      params:
        partition_mode: tables
      partition_by:
        - bucket(100, Field1)

S3 Vectors Reliability​

  • Race Condition Fix: Resolved a race condition in S3 Vectors index and bucket creation. The runtime also now checks if an index or bucket exists after a ConflictException, ensuring robust error handling during index creation and improving reliability for large-scale multi-index vector search.

Document Table Improvements​

  • Primary Key Update: Document tables now use the location column as the primary key, improving performance, consistency, and query reliability.

Additional Improvements & Bugfixes​

  • Reliability: Improved error handling and resource checks for S3 Vectors and DuckDB acceleration.
  • Validation: Expanded validation for partitioning and index creation.
  • Performance: Optimized partition refresh and index scan logic.
  • Bugfix: Don't nullify DuckDB release callbacks for schemas.

Contributors​

Breaking Changes​

No breaking changes.

Cookbook Updates​

No major cookbook updates.

The Spice Cookbook includes 81 recipes to help you get started with Spice quickly and easily.

Upgrading​

To upgrade to v1.8.2, use one of the following methods:

CLI:

spice upgrade

Homebrew:

brew upgrade spiceai/spiceai/spice

Docker:

Pull the spiceai/spiceai:1.8.2 image:

docker pull spiceai/spiceai:1.8.2

For available tags, see DockerHub.

Helm:

helm repo update
helm upgrade spiceai spiceai/spiceai

AWS Marketplace:

🎉 Spice is now available in the AWS Marketplace!

What's Changed​

Changelog​

  • Update mongo config for benchmarks by @krinart in #7546
  • Configurable DuckDB duckdb_index_scan_percentage & duckdb_index_scan_max_count by @lukekim in #7551
  • Fix race condition in S3 Vectors index and bucket creation by @kczimm in #7577
  • Use 'location' as primary key for document tables by @Jeadie in #7567
  • Update official Docker builds to use release binaries by @phillipleblanc in #7597
  • Hive-style partitioning for DuckDB file mode by @kczimm in #7563
  • New Generate Changelog workflow by @krinart in #7562
  • Add support for DuckDB table-based partitioning by @sgrebnov in #7581
  • DuckDB table partitioning: delete partitions that no longer exist after full refresh by @sgrebnov in #7614
  • Rename duckdb_partition_mode to partition_mode param by @sgrebnov in #7622
  • Fix license issue in table-providers by @phillipleblanc in #7620
  • Make DuckDB table partition data write threshold configurable by @sgrebnov in #7626
  • fix: Don't nullify DuckDB release callbacks for schemas by @peasee in #7628
  • Fix integration tests by reverting the use of batch inserts w/ prepared statements by @phillipleblanc in #7630
  • Return TableProvider from CandidateGeneration::search by @Jeadie in #7559
  • Handle table relations in HTTP v1/search by @Jeadie in #7615

Spice v1.8.1 (Oct 13, 2025)

· 5 min read
Viktor Yershov
Viktor Yershov
Senior Software Engineer at Spice AI

Announcing the release of Spice v1.8.1! 🚀

Spice v1.8.1 is a patch release that adds Acceleration Snapshots Indexes, and includes a number of bug fixes and performance improvements.

What's New in v1.8.1​

Acceleration Snapshot Indexes​

  • Management of Acceleration Snapshots has been improved by adopting an Iceberg-inspired metadata.json, which now encodes pointer IDs, schema serialization, and robust checksum and size, which is validate before loading the snapshot.

  • Acceleration Snapshot Metrics: The following metrics are now available for Acceleration Snapshots:

  • dataset_acceleration_snapshot_bootstrap_duration_ms: The time it took the runtime to download the snapshot - only emitted when it initially downloads the snapshot.

  • dataset_acceleration_snapshot_bootstrap_bytes: The number of bytes downloaded to bootstrap the acceleration from the snapshot.

  • dataset_acceleration_snapshot_bootstrap_checksum: The checksum of the snapshot used to bootstrap the acceleration.

  • dataset_acceleration_snapshot_failure_count: Number of failures encountered when writing a new snapshot at the end of the refresh cycle. A snapshot failure does not prevent the refresh from completing.

  • dataset_acceleration_snapshot_write_timestamp: Unix timestamp in seconds when the last snapshot was completed.

  • dataset_acceleration_snapshot_write_duration_ms: The time it took to write the snapshot to object storage.

  • dataset_acceleration_snapshot_write_bytes: The number of bytes written on the last snapshot write.

  • dataset_acceleration_snapshot_write_checksum: The SHA256 checksum of the last snapshot write.

To learn more, see the Acceleration Snapshots Documentation and the Metrics Documentation.

Improved Regular Expression for DuckDB acceleration​

Regular expression support has been expanded when using DuckDB acceleration for functions like regexp-like and regexp_match.

For more details, refer to the SQL Reference for the list of available regular expression functions.

Additional Improvements & Bugfixes​

  • Reliability: Resolved an issue with partitioning on empty partition sets.
  • Validation: Added better validation for incorrectly configured Spicepods.
  • Reliability: Fixed partition_by accelerations when a projection is applied on empty partition sets.
  • Performance: Ensured ListingTable partitions are pruned when filters are not used.
  • Performance: Don't download acceleration snapshots if the acceleration is already present.
  • Performance: Refactored some blocking I/O and synchronization in the async codebase by moving operations to tokio::task::spawn_blocking, replacing blocking locks with async-friendly variants.
  • Bugfix: Nullable fields are now supported for S3 Vectors index columns.

Contributors​

Breaking Changes​

No breaking changes.

Cookbook Updates​

  • New Accelerated Snapshots Recipe - The recipe shows how to bootstrap DuckDB accelerations from object storage to skip cold starts.

The Spice Cookbook includes 81 recipes to help you get started with Spice quickly and easily.

Upgrading​

To upgrade to v1.8.1, use one of the following methods:

CLI:

spice upgrade

Homebrew:

brew upgrade spiceai/spiceai/spice

Docker:

Pull the spiceai/spiceai:1.8.1 image:

docker pull spiceai/spiceai:1.8.1

For available tags, see DockerHub.

Helm:

helm repo update
helm upgrade spiceai spiceai/spiceai

AWS Marketplace:

🎉 Spice is now available in the AWS Marketplace!

What's Changed​

Changelog​

Spice v1.8.0 (Oct 6, 2025)

· 20 min read
Phillip LeBlanc
Phillip LeBlanc
Co-Founder and CTO of Spice AI

Announcing the release of Spice v1.8.0! 🧊

Spice v1.8.0 delivers major advances in data writes, scalable vector search, and now in preview—managed acceleration snapshots for fast cold starts. This release introduces write support for Iceberg tables using standard SQL INSERT INTO, partitioned S3 Vector indexes for petabyte-scale vector search, and preview of the AI SQL function for direct LLM integration in SQL. Additional improvements include improved reliability, and the v3.0.3 release of the Spice.js Node.js SDK.

What's New in v1.8.0​

Iceberg Table Write Support (Preview)​

Append Data to Iceberg Tables with SQL INSERT INTO: Spice now supports writing to Iceberg tables and catalogs using standard SQL INSERT INTO statements. This enables data ingestion, transformation, and pipeline use cases—no Spark or external writer required.

  • Append-only: Initial version targets appends; no overwrite or delete.
  • Schema validation: Inserted data must match the target table schema.
  • Secure by default: Writes are only enabled for datasets or catalogs explicitly marked with access: read_write.

Example Spicepod configuration:

catalogs:
  - from: iceberg:https://glue.ap-northeast-3.amazonaws.com/iceberg/v1/catalogs/111111/namespaces
    name: ice
    access: read_write

datasets:
  - from: iceberg:https://iceberg-catalog-host.com/v1/namespaces/my_namespace/tables/my_table
    name: iceberg_table
    access: read_write

Example SQL usage:

-- Insert from another table
INSERT INTO iceberg_table
SELECT * FROM existing_table;

-- Insert with values
INSERT INTO iceberg_table (id, name, amount)
VALUES (1, 'John', 100.0), (2, 'Jane', 200.0);

-- Insert into catalog table
INSERT INTO ice.sales.transactions
VALUES (1001, '2025-01-15', 299.99, 'completed');

Note: Only Iceberg datasets and catalogs with access: read_write support writes. Internal Spice tables and other connectors remain read-only.

Learn more in the Iceberg Data Connector documentation.

Acceleration Snapshots for Fast Cold Starts (Preview)​

Bootstrap Managed Accelerations from Object Storage: Spice now supports managed acceleration snapshots in preview, enabling datasets accelerated with file-based engines (DuckDB or SQLite) to bootstrap from a snapshot stored in object storage (such as S3) if the local acceleration file does not exist on startup. This dramatically reduces cold start times and enables ephemeral storage for accelerations with persistent recovery.

Key features:

  • Rapid readiness: Datasets can become ready in seconds by downloading a pre-built snapshot, skipping lengthy initial acceleration.
  • Hive-style partitioning: Snapshots are organized by month, day, and dataset for easy retention and management.
  • Flexible bootstrapping: Configurable fallback and retry behavior if a snapshot is missing or corrupted.

Example Spicepod configuration:

snapshots:
  enabled: true
  location: s3://some_bucket/some_folder/ # Folder for storing snapshots
  bootstrap_on_failure_behavior: warn # Options: warn, retry, fallback
  params:
    s3_auth: iam_role # All S3 dataset params accepted here

datasets:
  - from: s3://some_bucket/some_table/
    name: some_table
    params:
      file_format: parquet
      s3_auth: iam_role
    acceleration:
      enabled: true
      snapshots: enabled # Options: enabled, disabled, bootstrap_only, create_only
      engine: duckdb
      mode: file
      params:
        duckdb_file: /nvme/some_table.db

How it works:

  • On startup, if the acceleration file does not exist, Spice checks the snapshot location for the latest snapshot and downloads it.
  • Snapshots are stored as: s3://some_bucket/some_folder/month=2025-09/day=2025-09-30/dataset=some_table/some_table_<timestamp>.db
  • If no snapshot is found, a new acceleration file is created as usual.
  • Snapshots are written after each refresh (unless configured otherwise).

Supported snapshot modes:

  • enabled: Download and write snapshots.
  • bootstrap_only: Only download on startup, do not write new snapshots.
  • create_only: Only write snapshots, do not download on startup.
  • disabled: No snapshotting.

Note: This feature is only supported for file-based accelerations (DuckDB or SQLite) with dedicated files.

Why use acceleration snapshots?

  • Faster cold starts: Skip waiting for full acceleration on startup.
  • Ephemeral storage: Use fast local disks (e.g., NVMe) for acceleration, with persistent recovery from object storage.
  • Disaster recovery: Recover from federated source outages by bootstrapping from the latest snapshot.

Partitioned S3 Vector Indexes​

Efficient, Scalable Vector Search with Partitioning: Spice now supports partitioning Amazon S3 Vector indexes and scatter-gather queries using a partition_by expression in the dataset vector engine configuration. Partitioned indexes enable faster ingestion, lower query latency, and scale to billions of vectors.

Example Spicepod configuration:

datasets:
  - name: reviews
    vectors:
      enabled: true
      engine: s3_vectors
      params:
        s3_vectors_bucket: my-bucket
        s3_vectors_index: base-embeddings
      partition_by:
        - 'bucket(50, PULocationID)'
    columns:
      - name: body
        embeddings:
          from: bedrock_titan
      - name: title
        embeddings:
          from: bedrock_titan

See the Amazon S3 Vectors documentation for details.

AI SQL function for LLM Integration (Preview)​

LLMs Directly In SQL: A new asynchronous ai SQL function enables direct calls to LLMs from SQL queries for text generation, translation, classification, and more. This feature is released in preview and supports both default and model-specific invocation.

Example Spicepod model configuration:

models:
  - name: gpt-4o
    from: openai:gpt-4o
    params:
      openai_api_key: ${secrets:openai_key}

Example SQL usage:

-- basic usage with default model
SELECT ai('hi, this prompt is directly from SQL.');
-- basic usage with specified model
SELECT ai('hi, this prompt is directly from SQL.', 'gpt-4o');
-- Using row data as input to the prompt
SELECT ai(concat_ws(' ', 'Categorize the zone', Zone, 'in a single word. Only return the word.')) AS category
FROM taxi_zones
LIMIT 10;

Learn more in the SQL Reference AI documentation.

Remote Endpoint Support for Spice CLI​

Run CLI Commands Remotely: The Spice CLI now supports connecting to remote Spice instances, enabling you to run spice sql, spice search, and spice chat commands from your local machine against a remote spiced daemon or to Spice Cloud. Previously, these commands required running on the same machine as the runtime. Now, new flags allow remote execution:

  • --cloud: Connect to a Spice Cloud instance (requires --api-key).
  • --endpoint <endpoint>: Connect to a remote Spice instance via HTTP or Arrow Flight SQL (gRPC). Supports http://, https://, grpc://, or grpc+tls:// schemes.

Examples:

# Run SQL queries against a remote Spice instance
spice sql --endpoint http://remote-host:8090

# Use Spice Cloud for chat or search
spice chat --cloud --api-key <your-api-key>
spice search --cloud --api-key <your-api-key>

Supported CLI Commands:

  • spice sql --cloud / spice sql --endpoint <endpoint>
  • spice search --cloud / spice search --endpoint <endpoint>
  • spice chat --cloud / spice chat --endpoint <endpoint>

Additional Flags:

  • --headers: Pass custom HTTP headers to the remote endpoint.
  • --tls-root-certificate-file: Specify a root certificate for TLS verification.
  • --user-agent: Set a custom user agent for requests.

For more details, see the Spice CLI Command Reference.

Spice.js v3.0.3 SDK​

Spice.js v3.0.3 Released: The official Spice.ai Node.js/JavaScript SDK has been updated to v3.0.3, bringing cross-platform support, new APIs, and improved reliability for both Node.js and browser environments.

  • Modern Query Methods: Use sql(), sqlJson(), and nsql() for flexible querying, streaming, and natural language to SQL.
  • Browser Support: SDK now works in browsers and web applications, automatically selecting the optimal transport (gRPC or HTTP).
  • Health Checks & Dataset Refresh: Easily monitor Spice runtime health and trigger dataset refreshes on demand.
  • Automatic HTTP Fallback: If gRPC/Flight is unavailable, the SDK falls back to HTTP automatically.
  • Migration Guidance: v3 requires Node.js 20+, uses camelCase parameters, and introduces a new package structure.

Example usage:

import { SpiceClient } from '@spiceai/spice'

const client = new SpiceClient(apiKey)
const table = await client.sql('SELECT * FROM my_table LIMIT 10')
console.table(table.toArray())

See Spice.js SDK documentation for full details, migration tips, and advanced usage.

Additional Improvements​

  • Reliability: Improved logging, error handling, and network readiness checks across connectors (Iceberg, Databricks, etc.).
  • Vector search durability and scale: Refined logging, stricter default limits, safeguards against index-only scans and duplicate results, and always-accessible metadata for robust queryability at scale.
  • Cache behavior: Tightened cache logic for modification queries.
  • Full-Text Search: FTS metadata columns now usable in projections; max search results increased to 1000.
  • RRF Hybrid Search: Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) UDTF enhancements for advanced hybrid search scenarios.

Contributors​

Breaking Changes​

This release introduces two breaking changes associated with the search observability and tooling.

Firstly, the document_similarity tool has been renamed to search. This has the equivalent change to tracing of these tool calls:

## Old: v1.7.1
>> spice trace tool_use::document_similarity
>> curl -XPOST http://localhost:8090/v1/tools/document_similarity \
  -d '{
    "datasets": ["my_tbl"],
    "text": "Welcome to another Spice release"
  }'

## New: v1.8.0
>> spice trace tool_use::search
>> curl -XPOST http://localhost:8090/v1/tools/search \
  -d '{
    "datasets": ["my_tbl"],
    "text": "Welcome to another Spice release"
  }'

Secondly, the vector_search task in runtime.task_history has been renamed to search.

Cookbook Updates​

The Spice Cookbook now includes 80 recipes to help you get started with Spice quickly and easily.

Upgrading​

To upgrade to v1.8.0, use one of the following methods:

CLI:

spice upgrade

Homebrew:

brew upgrade spiceai/spiceai/spice

Docker:

Pull the spiceai/spiceai:1.8.0 image:

docker pull spiceai/spiceai:1.8.0

For available tags, see DockerHub.

Helm:

helm repo update
helm upgrade spiceai spiceai/spiceai

AWS Marketplace:

🎉 Spice is now available in the AWS Marketplace!

What's Changed​

Dependencies​

  • iceberg-rust: Upgraded to v0.7.0-rc.1
  • mimalloc: Upgraded from 0.1.47 to 0.1.48
  • azure_core: Upgraded from 0.27.0 to 0.28.0
  • Jimver/cuda-toolkit: Upgraded from 0.2.27 to 0.2.28

Changelog​

Spice v1.7.1 (Sep 29, 2025)

· 6 min read
Kevin Zimmerman
Kevin Zimmerman
Principal Software Engineer at Spice AI

Announcing the release of Spice v1.7.1! 🔍

Spice v1.7.1 is a patch release focused on search improvements, bug fixes, and performance enhancements. This release introduces the Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) user-defined table function (UDTF) for hybrid search, improves vector and text search reliability, and resolves several issues across the runtime, connectors, and query engine.

What's New in v1.7.1​

Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) UDTF: Spice now supports Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) as a user-defined table function, enabling advanced hybrid search scenarios that combine results from multiple search methods (e.g., vector and text search) for improved relevance ranking.

Features:

  • Multi-search fusion: Combine results from vector_search, text_search, and other search UDTFs in a single query.
  • Advanced tuning: Per-query ranking weights, recency boosting, and configurable decay functions.
  • Performance: Optional user-specified join key for optimal performance.
  • Automatic joining: Falls back to on-the-fly JOIN key computation when no explicit key is provided.

Example usage:

SELECT id, title, content, fused_score
FROM rrf(
  vector_search(documents, 'machine learning algorithms', rank_weight => 1.5),
  text_search(documents, 'neural networks deep learning', rank_weight => 1.2),
  join_key => 'id',    -- optional join key for optimal performance
  k => 60.0            -- optional smoothing factor
)
WHERE fused_score > 0.01
ORDER BY fused_score DESC;

Learn more in the RRF documentation.

Acceleration Refresh Metrics: Spice now exposes additional Prometheus metrics that provide detailed observability into dataset acceleration refreshes. These metrics help monitor data freshness and ingestion lag for accelerated datasets with a time column.

Reported metrics:

Metric NameDescription
dataset_acceleration_max_timestamp_before_refresh_msMaximum value of the dataset's time column before refresh (milliseconds).
dataset_acceleration_max_timestamp_after_refresh_msMaximum value of the dataset's time column after refresh (milliseconds).
dataset_acceleration_refresh_lag_msDifference between max timestamp after and before refresh (milliseconds).
dataset_acceleration_ingestion_lag_msLag between current wall-clock time and max timestamp after refresh (milliseconds).

These metrics are emitted during each acceleration refresh and can be scraped by Prometheus for monitoring and alerting. For more details, see the Observability documentation.

Bug Fixes & Improvements​

This release resolves several issues and improves reliability across search, connectors, and query planning:

  • Full-Text Search (FTS): Ensure FTS metadata columns can be used in projection, fix JOIN-level filters not having columns in schema, and adds support for persistent file-based FTS indexes. Default limit of 1000 results if no limit specified.
  • Vector Search: Default limit of 1000 results if no limit specified, and fix removing embedding column.
  • Databricks SQL Warehouse: Improved error handling and support for async queries.
  • Other: Fixes for Anthropic model regex validation, tweaked AI-model health checks, and improved error messages.

Contributors​

Breaking Changes​

No breaking changes.

Cookbook Updates​

  • Added Hybrid-Search using RRF - Combine results from multiple search methods (vector and text search) using Reciprocal Rank Fusion for improved relevance ranking.

The Spice Cookbook includes 78 recipes to help you get started with Spice quickly and easily.

Upgrading​

To upgrade to v1.7.1, use one of the following methods:

CLI:

spice upgrade

Homebrew:

brew upgrade spiceai/spiceai/spice

Docker:

Pull the spiceai/spiceai:1.7.1 image:

docker pull spiceai/spiceai:1.7.1

For available tags, see DockerHub.

Helm:

helm repo update
helm upgrade spiceai spiceai/spiceai

AWS Marketplace:

🎉 Spice is now available in the AWS Marketplace!

What's Changed​

Changelog​

  • ensure FTS metadata columns can be used in projection (#7282) by @Jeadie in #7282
  • Fix JOIN level filters not having columns in schema (#7287) by @Jeadie in #7287
  • Use file-based fts index (#7024) by @Jeadie in #7024
  • Remove 'PostApplyCandidateGeneration' (#7288) by @Jeadie in #7288
  • RRF: Rank and recency boosting (#7294) by @mach-kernel in #7294
  • RRF: Preserve base ranking when results differ -> FULL OUTER JOIN does not produce time column (#7300) by @mach-kernel in #7300
  • fix removing embedding column (#7302) by @Jeadie in #7302
  • RRF: Fix decay for disjoint result sets (#7305) by @mach-kernel in #7305
  • RRF: Project top scores, do not yield duplicate results (#7306) by @mach-kernel in #7306
  • RRF: Case sensitive column/ident handling (#7309) by @mach-kernel in #7309
  • For vector_search, use a default limit of 1000 if no limit specified (#7311) by @lukekim in #7311
  • Fix Anthropic model regex and add validation tests (#7319) by @ewgenius in #7319
  • Enhancement: Implement before/after/lag metrics for acceleration refresh (#7310) by @krinart in #7310
  • Refactor chat model health check to lower tokens usage for reasoning models (#7317) by @ewgenius in #7317
  • Enable chunking in SearchIndex (#7143) by @Jeadie in #7143
  • Use logical plan in SearchQueryProvider. (#7314) by @Jeadie in #7314
  • FTS max search results 100 -> 1000 (#7331) by @Jeadie in #7331
  • Improve Databricks SQL Warehouse Error Handling (#7332) by @sgrebnov in #7332
  • use spicepod embedding model name for 'model_name' (#7333) by @Jeadie in #7333
  • Handle async queries for Databricks SQL Warehouse API (#7335) by @phillipleblanc in #7335
  • RRF: Fix ident resolution for struct fields, autohashed join key for varying types (#7339) by @mach-kernel in #7339

Spice v1.7.0 (Sep 23, 2025)

· 21 min read
Sergei Grebnov
Sergei Grebnov
Senior Software Engineer at Spice AI

Announcing the release of Spice v1.7.0! ⚡

Spice v1.7.0 upgrades to DataFusion v49 for improved performance and query optimization, introduces real-time full-text search indexing for CDC streams, EmbeddingGemma support for high-quality embeddings, new search table functions powering the /v1/search API, embedding request caching for faster and cost-efficient search and indexing, and OpenAI Responses API tool calls with streaming. This release also includes numerous bug fixes across CDC streams, vector search, the Kafka Data Connector, and error reporting.

What's New in v1.7.0​

DataFusion v49 Highlights​

DataFusion Clickbench Performance Graph Source: DataFusion 49.0.0 Release Blog.

Performance Improvements 🚀

  • Equivalence System Upgrade: Faster planning for queries with many columns, enabling more sophisticated sort-based optimizations.
  • Dynamic Filters & TopK Pushdown: Queries with ORDER BY and LIMIT now use dynamic filters and physical filter pushdown, skipping unnecessary data reads for much faster top-k queries.
  • Compressed Spill Files: Intermediate files written during sort/group spill to disk are now compressed, reducing disk usage and improving performance.
  • WITHIN GROUP for Ordered-Set Aggregates: Support for ordered-set aggregate functions (e.g., percentile_disc) with WITHIN GROUP.
  • REGEXP_INSTR Function: Find regex match positions in strings.

Spice Runtime Highlights​

EmbeddingGemma Support: Spice now supports EmbeddingGemma, Google's state-of-the-art embedding model for text and documents. EmbeddingGemma provides high-quality, efficient embeddings for semantic search, retrieval, and recommendation tasks. You can use EmbeddingGemma via HuggingFace in your Spicepod configuration:

Example spicepod.yml snippet:

embeddings:
  - from: huggingface:huggingface.co/google/embeddinggemma-300m
    name: embeddinggemma
    params:
      hf_token: ${secrets:HUGGINGFACE_TOKEN}

Learn more about EmbeddingGemma in the official documentation.

POST /v1/search API Use Search Table Functions: The /v1/search API now uses the new text_search and vector_search Table Functions for improved performance.

Embedding Request Caching: The runtime now supports caching embedding requests, reducing latency and cost for repeated content and search requests.

Example spicepod.yml snippet:

runtime:
  caching:
    embeddings:
      enabled: true
      max_size: 128mb
      item_ttl: 5s

See the Caching documentation for details.

Real-Time Indexing for Full Text Search: Full Text search indexing is now supported for connectors that enable real-time changes, such as Debezium CDC streams. Adding a full-text index on a column with refresh_mode: changes works as it does for full/append-mode refreshes, enabling instant search on new data.

Example spicepod.yml snippet:

datasets:
  - from: debezium:cdc.public.question
    name: questions
    acceleration:
      enabled: true
      engine: duckdb
      primary_key: id
      refresh_mode: changes # Use 'changes'
    params: *kafka_params
    columns:
      - name: title
        full_text_search:
          enabled: true # Enable full-text-search indexing
          row_id:
            - id

OpenAI Responses API Tool Calls with Streaming: The OpenAI Responses API now supports tool calls with streaming, enabling advanced model interactions such as web_search and code_interpreter with real-time response streaming. This allows you to invoke OpenAI-hosted tools and receive results as they are generated.

Learn more in the OpenAI Model Provider documentation.

Runtime Output Level Configuration: You can now set the output_level parameter in the Spicepod runtime configuration to control logging verbosity in addition to the existing CLI and environment variable support. Supported values are info, verbose, and very_verbose. The value is applied in the following priority: CLI, environment variables, then YAML configuration.

Example spicepod.yml snippet:

runtime:
  output_level: info # or verbose, very_verbose

For more details on configuring output level, see the Troubleshooting documentation.

Bug Fixes​

Several bugs and issues have been resolved in this release, including:

  • CDC Streams: Fixed issues where refresh_mode: changes could prevent the Spice runtime from becoming Ready, and improved support for full-text indexing on CDC streams.
  • Vector Search: Fixed bugs where vector search HTTP pipeline could not find more than one IndexedTableProvider, and resolved errors with field mismatches in vector_search UDTF.
  • Kafka Integration: Improved Kafka schema inference with configurable sample size, improved consumer group persistence for SQLite and Postgres accelerations, and added cooperative mode support.
  • Perplexity Web Search: Fixed bug where Perplexity web search sometimes used incorrect query schema (limit).
  • Databricks: Fixed issue with unparsing embedded columns.
  • Error Reporting: ThrottlingException is now reported correctly instead of as InternalError.
  • Iceberg Data Connector: Added support for LIMIT pushdown.
  • Amazon S3 Vectors: Fixed ingestion issues with zero-vectors and improved handling when vector index is full.
  • Tracing: Fixed vector search tracing to correctly report SQL status.

Contributors​

New Contributors​

Breaking Changes​

No breaking changes.

Cookbook Updates​

The Spice Cookbook includes 78 recipes to help you get started with Spice quickly and easily.

Upgrading​

To upgrade to v1.7.0, use one of the following methods:

CLI:

spice upgrade

Homebrew:

brew upgrade spiceai/spiceai/spice

Docker:

Pull the spiceai/spiceai:1.7.0 image:

docker pull spiceai/spiceai:1.7.0

For available tags, see DockerHub.

Helm:

helm repo update
helm upgrade spiceai spiceai/spiceai

AWS Marketplace:

🎉 Spice is now available in the AWS Marketplace!

What's Changed​

Dependencies​

Changelog​