Announcing the release of Spice v0.10.1-alpha! 🔥

The v0.10.1-alpha release focuses on stability, bug fixes, and usability by improving error messages when using SQLite data accelerators, improving the PostgreSQL support, and adding a basic Helm chart.

Highlights in v0.10.1-alpha​

Improved PostgreSQL support for Data Connectors TLS is now supported with PostgreSQL Data Connectors and there is improved VARCHAR and BPCHAR conversions through Spice.

Improved Error messages Simplified error messages from Spice when propagating errors from Data Connectors and Accelerator Engines.

Spice Pods Command The spice pods command can give you quick statistics about models, dependencies, and datasets that are loaded by the Spice runtime.

Kubernetes Helm Deployment​

Spice.ai can be deployed to Kubernetes using Helm. Here's a quick guide to get started:

Step 1. (Optional) Start a local kind cluster:

go install sigs.k8s.io/[email protected]
kind create cluster

Step 2. Install Spice in your Kubernetes cluster using Helm:

helm repo add spiceai https://helm.spiceai.org
helm install spiceai spiceai/spiceai

Step 3. Verify that the Spice pods are running:

kubectl get pods
kubectl logs deploy/spiceai

Step 4. Run the Spice SQL REPL inside the running pod:

kubectl exec -it deploy/spiceai -- spiced --repl

Learn more about deploying Spice.ai to Kubernetes

Contributors​

• @phillipleblanc
• @mitchdevenport
• @ewgenius
• @sgrebnov
• @lukekim
• @digadeesh

New in this release​

• Adds Basic Helm Chart for spiceai (https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai/pull/1002)
• Adds Support for spice login in environments with no browser. (https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai/pull/994)
• Adds TLS support in Postgres connector. (https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai/pull/970)
• Fixes Improve Postgres VARCHAR and BPCHAR conversion. (https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai/pull/993)
• Fixes spice pods Returns incorrect counts. (https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai/pull/998)
• Fixes Return friendly error messages for unsupported types in sqlite. (https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai/pull/982)
• Fixes Pass Tonic errors when receiving errors from dependencies. (https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai/pull/995)

Resources​

• Getting started with Spice.ai
• Documentation

Community​

Spice.ai started with the vision to make AI easy for developers. We are building Spice.ai in the open and with the community. Reach out on Slack or by email to get involved.

• Twitter: @spice_ai
• Slack: spiceai.org/slack
• Telegram: Spice AI Discussion
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/spiceai
• Email: [email protected]

Announcing the release of Spice v0.10-alpha! 🧙‍♂️

The Spice.ai v0.10-alpha release focused on additions and updates to improve stability, usability, and the overall Spice developer experience.

Highlights in v0.10-alpha​

Public Bucket Support for S3 Data Connector: The S3 Data Connector now supports public buckets in addition to buckets requiring an access id and key.

JDBC-Client Connectivity: Improved connectivity for JDBC clients, like Tableau.

User Experience Improvements:

• Friendlier error messages across the board to make debugging and development better.
• Added a spice login postgres command, streamlining the process for connecting to PostgreSQL databases.
• Added PostgreSQL connection verification and connection string support, enhancing usability for PostgreSQL users.

Grafana Dashboard: Improving the ability to monitor Spice deployments, a standard Grafana dashboard is now available.

Contributors​

• @phillipleblanc
• @mitchdevenport
• @Jeadie
• @ewgenius
• @sgrebnov
• @y-f-u
• @lukekim
• @digadeesh

New in this release​

• Fixes Gracefully handle Arrow Flight DoExchange connection resets
• Adds Grafana Dashboard
• Adds Flight SQL CommandGetTableTypes Command support (improves JDBC-client connectivity)
• Adds Friendlier error messages
• Adds spice login postgres command
• Adds PostgreSQL connection verification
• Adds PostgreSQL connection string support
• Adds Linux aarch64 build
• Updates Improves spice status with dataset metrics
• Updates CLI REPL improved show tables output
• Updates CLI REPL limit output to 500 rows
• Updates Improved README.md with architecture diagram updates
• Updates Improved CI run time.
• Updates Use macOS hosted Actions runner

Resources​

• Getting started with Spice.ai
• Documentation

Community​

Spice.ai started with the vision to make AI easy for developers. We are building Spice.ai in the open and with the community. Reach out on Slack or by email to get involved.

• Twitter: @spice_ai
• Slack: spiceai.org/slack
• Telegram: Spice AI Discussion
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/spiceai
• Email: [email protected]

Announcing the release of Spice v0.9.1-alpha! 🧙‍♂️

The v0.9.1 release focused on stability, bug fixes, and usability by adding spice CLI commands for listing Spicepods (spice pods), Models (spice models), Datasets (spice datasets), and improved status (spice status) details. In addition, the Arrow Flight SQL (flightsql) data connector and SQLite (sqlite) data store were added.

Highlights in v0.9.1-alpha​

FlightSQL data connector: Arrow Flight SQL can now be used as a connector for federated SQL query.

SQLite data backend: SQLite can now be used as a data store for acceleration.

Contributors​

• @phillipleblanc
• @mitchdevenport
• @Jeadie
• @ewgenius
• @sgrebnov
• @y-f-u
• @lukekim

New in this release​

• Adds FlightSQL data connector (flightsql).
• Adds SQLite data store, supports both in-memory and file based (sqlite).
• Adds support for date, varchar, bpchar, and primitive list types for the PostgreSQL data connector and data store.
• Adds spice pods, spice status, spice datasets, and spice models CLI commands.
• Adds GET /v1/spicepods API for listing loaded Spicepods.
• Adds spiced Docker CI build and release.
• Adds E2E tests for release installation and local acceleration.
• Adds E2E tests and instructions to run basic TPC-H benchmark tests.
• Adds linux/arm64 binary build.
• Fixes spice sql REPL panics when query result is too large. (https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai/pull/875)
• Fixes --access-secret in spice s3 login. (https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai/pull/894)
• Fixes version check upgrade logic.

Resources​

• Getting started with Spice.ai
• Documentation

Community​

Spice.ai started with the vision to make AI easy for developers. We are building Spice.ai in the open and with the community. Reach out on Slack or by email to get involved.

• Twitter: @spice_ai
• Slack: spiceai.org/slack
• Telegram: Spice AI Discussion
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/spiceai
• Email: [email protected]

Announcing the release of Spice v0.9-alpha! 🧙‍♂️

The v0.9 release adds several data connectors including the Spice data connector for the ability to connect to other Spice instances. Improved observability for the Spice runtime has been added with the new /metrics endpoint for monitoring deployed instances.

Highlights in v0.9-alpha​

Arrow Flight SQL endpoint: The Arrow Flight endpoint now supports Flight SQL, including JDBC, ODBC, and ADBC enabling database clients like DBeaver or BI applications like Tableau to connect to and query the Spice runtime.

Spice.ai data connector: Use other Spice runtime instances as data connectors for federated SQL query across Spice deployments and for chaining Spice runtimes.

Keyring secret store: Use the operating system native credential store, like macOS keychain for storing secrets used by the Spice runtime.

PostgreSQL data connector: PostgreSQL can now be used as both a data store for acceleration and as a connector for federated SQL query.

Databricks data connector: Databricks as a connector for federated SQL query across Delta Lake tables.

S3 data connector: S3 as a connector for federated SQL query across Parquet files stored in S3.

Metrics endpoint: Added new /metrics endpoint for Spice runtime observability and monitoring with the following metrics:

- spiced_runtime_http_server_start counter
- spiced_runtime_flight_server_start counter
- datasets_count gauge
- load_dataset summary
- load_secrets summary
- datasets/load_error counter
- datasets/count counter
- models/load_error counter
- models/count counter

Contributors​

• @phillipleblanc
• @mitchdevenport
• @Jeadie
• @ewgenius
• @sgrebnov
• @Sevenannn
• @y-f-u
• @digadeesh
• @lukekim

New in this release​

• Adds Keyring secret store (keyring).
• Adds PostgreSQL data connector (postgres).
• Adds Spice.ai data connector (spiceai).
• Adds Arrow Flight SQL (JDBC/ODBC/ADBC) support.
• Adds Databricks data connector (databricks) - Delta Lake support.
• Adds S3 data connector (s3) - Parquet support.
• Adds /v1/models API.
• Adds /v1/status API.
• Adds /metrics API.

Resources​

• Getting started with Spice.ai
• Documentation

Community​

Spice.ai started with the vision to make AI easy for developers. We are building Spice.ai in the open and with the community. Reach out on Slack or by email to get involved.

• Twitter: @spice_ai
• Slack: spiceai.org/slack
• Telegram: Spice AI Discussion
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/spiceai
• Email: [email protected]

Announcing the release of Spice v0.8-alpha! 🏹

This is a minor release that builds on the new Rust-based runtime, adding stability and a preview of new features for the first major release.

Highlights in v0.8-alpha​

Secrets management: Spice 0.8 runtime can now configure and retrieve secrets from local environment variables and in a Kubernetes cluster.

Data tables can be locally accelerated using PostgreSQL

New in this release​

• Adds Secrets management in local environment variables and Kubernetes clusters.
• Adds (Preview) PostgreSQL as a data table acceleration engine.

Resources​

• Getting started with Spice.ai
• Documentation

Community​

Spice.ai started with the vision to make AI easy for developers. We are building Spice.ai in the open and with the community. Reach out on Slack or by email to get involved.

• Twitter: @spice_ai
• Slack: spiceai.org/slack
• Telegram: Spice AI Discussion
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/spiceai
• Email: [email protected]

Announcing the release of Spice v0.7-alpha! 🏹

Spice v0.7-alpha is an all new implementation of Spice written in Rust. The Spice v0.7 runtime provides developers with a unified SQL query interface to locally accelerate and query data tables sourced from any database, data warehouse, or data lake.

Learn more and get started in minutes with the updated Quickstart in the repository README!

Highlights in v0.7-alpha​

DataFusion SQL Query Engine: Spice v0.7 leverages the Apache DataFusion query engine to provide very fast, high quality SQL query across one or more local or remote data sources.

Data tables can be locally accelerated using Apache Arrow in-memory or by DuckDB.

New in this release​

• Adds runtime rewritten in Rust for high-performance.
• Adds Apache DataFusion SQL query engine.
• Adds The Spice.ai platform as a data source.
• Adds Dremio as a data source.
• Adds OpenTelemetry (OTEL) collector.
• Adds local data table acceleration.
• Adds DuckDB file or in-memory as a data table acceleration engine.
• Adds In-memory Apache Arrow as a data table acceleration engine.
• Removes the built-in AI training engine; now cloud-based and provided by the Spice.ai platform.
• Removes the built-in dashboard and web-interface; now cloud-based and provided by the Spice.ai platform.

Resources​

• Getting started with Spice.ai
• Documentation

Community​

Spice.ai started with the vision to make AI easy for developers. We are building Spice.ai in the open and with the community. Reach out on Slack or by email to get involved.

• Twitter: @spice_ai
• Slack: spiceai.org/slack
• Telegram: Spice AI Discussion
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/spiceai
• Email: [email protected]

Announcing the release of Spice.ai v0.6.1-alpha! 🌶

Building upon the Apache Arrow support in v0.6-alpha, Spice.ai now includes new Apache Arrow data processor and Apache Arrow Flight data connector components! Together, these create a high-performance bulk-data transport directly into the Spice.ai ML engine. Coupled with big data systems from the Apache Arrow ecosystem like Hive, Drill, Spark, Snowflake, and BigQuery, it's now easier than ever to combine big data with Spice.ai.

And we're also excited to announce the release of Spice.xyz! 🎉

Spice.xyz is data and AI infrastructure for web3. It’s web3 data made easy. Insanely fast and purpose designed for applications and ML.

Spice.xyz delivers data in Apache Arrow format, over high-performance Apache Arrow Flight APIs to your application, notebook, ML pipeline, and of course through these new data components, to the Spice.ai runtime.

Read the announcement post at blog.spice.ai.

New in this release​

• Adds Apache Arrow Data Processor
• Adds Apache Arrow Flight Data Connector

Now built with Go 1.18.

Dependency updates​

• Updates to React 18
• Updates to CRA 5
• Updates to Glide DataGrid 4
• Updates to SWR 1.2
• Updates to TypeScript 4.6

Resources​

• Getting started with Spice.ai
• Documentation
• Quickstarts and Samples

Community​

Spice.ai started with the vision to make AI easy for developers. We are building Spice.ai in the open and with the community. Reach out on Slack or by email to get involved. We will also be starting a community call series soon!

• Twitter: @spice_ai
• Slack: spiceai.org/slack
• Telegram: Spice AI Discussion
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/spiceai
• Email: [email protected]

Announcing the release of Spice.ai v0.6-alpha! 🏹

Spice.ai now scales to datasets 10-100 larger enabling new classes of uses cases and applications! 🚀 We've completely rebuilt Spice.ai's data processing and transport upon Apache Arrow, a high-performance platform that uses an in-memory columnar format. Spice.ai joins other major projects including Apache Spark, pandas, and InfluxDB in being powered by Apache Arrow. This also paves the way for high-performance data connections to the Spice.ai runtime using Apache Arrow Flight and import/export of data using Apache Parquet. We're incredibly excited about the potential this architecture has for building intelligent applications on top of a high-performance transport between application data sources the Spice.ai AI engine.

Highlights in v0.6-alpha​

Massive improvement in data loading performance and dataset scale​

From data connectors, to REST API, to AI engine, we've now rebuilt Spice.ai's data processing and transport on the Apache Arrow project. Specifically, using the Apache Arrow for Go implementation. Many thanks to Matt Topol for his contributions to the project and guidance on using it.

This release includes a change to the Spice.ai runtime to AI Engine transport from sending text CSV over gGPC to Apache Arrow Records over IPC (Unix sockets).

This is a breaking change to the Data Processor interface, as it now uses arrow.Record instead of Observation.

Benchmarking v0.6​

Before v0.6, Spice.ai would not scale into the 100s of 1000s of rows.

After building on Arrow, Spice.ai now easily scales beyond millions of rows.

New in this release​

• Adds Apache Arrow data processing and transport.
• Fixes TensorBoard logging and monitoring when using GitHub Codespaces and Docker.
• Adds Polling HTTP Data Connector

Resources​

• Getting started with Spice.ai
• Documentation
• Quickstarts and Samples

Community​

Spice.ai started with the vision to make AI easy for developers. We are building Spice.ai in the open and with the community. Reach out on Slack or by email to get involved. We will also be starting a community call series soon!

• Slack: spiceai.org/slack
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/spiceai
• Twitter: @spice_ai
• Email: [email protected]

Announcing the release of Spice.ai v0.5.1-alpha! 📈

This minor release builds upon v0.5-alpha adding the ability to start training from the dashboard plus support for monitoring training runs with TensorBoard.

Highlights in v0.5.1-alpha​

Start training from dashboard​

A "Start Training" button has been added to the pod page on the dashboard so that you can easily start training runs from that context.

Training runs can now be started by:

• Modifications to the Spicepod YAML file.
• The spice train <pod name> command.
• The "Start Training" dashboard button.
• POST API calls to /api/v0.1/pods/{pod name}/train

TensorBoard monitoring​

TensorBoard monitoring is now supported when using DQL (default) or the new SACD learning algorithms that was announced in v0.5-alpha.

When enabled, TensorBoard logs will automatically be collected and a "Open TensorBoard" button will be shown on the pod page in the dashboard.

Logging can be enabled at the pod level with the training_loggers pod param or per training run with the CLI --training-loggers argument.

Support for VPG will be added in v0.6-alpha. The design allows for additional loggers to be added in the future. Let us know what you'd like to see!

New in this release​

• Adds a start training button on the dashboard pod page.
• Adds TensorBoard logging and monitoring when using DQL and SACD learning algorithms.

Dependency updates​

• Updates to Tailwind 3.0.6
• Updates to Glide Data Grid 3.2.1

Resources​

• Getting started with Spice.ai
• Documentation
• Quickstarts and Samples

Community​

Spice.ai started with the vision to make AI easy for developers. We are building Spice.ai in the open and with the community. Reach out on Slack or by email to get involved. We will also be starting a community call series soon!

• Slack: spiceai.org/slack
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/spiceai
• Twitter: @spice_ai
• Email: [email protected]

We are excited to announce the release of Spice.ai v0.5-alpha! 🥇

Highlights include a new learning algorithm called "Soft Actor-Critic" (SAC), fixes to the behavior of spice upgrade, and a more consistent authoring experience for reward functions.

If you are new to Spice.ai, check out the getting started guide and star spiceai/spiceai on GitHub.

Highlights in v0.5-alpha​

Soft Actor-Critic (Discrete) (SAC) Learning Algorithm​

The addition of the Soft Actor-Critic (Discrete) (SAC) learning algorithm is a significant improvement to the power of the AI engine. It is not set as the default algorithm yet, so to start using it pass the --learning-algorithm sacd parameter to spice train. We'd love to get your feedback on how its working!

Consistent reward authoring experience​

With the addition of the reward function files that allow you to edit your reward function in a Python file, the behavior of starting a new training session by editing the reward function code was lost. With this release, that behavior is restored.

In addition, there is a breaking change to the variables used to access the observation state and interpretations. This change was made to better reflect the purpose of the variables and make them easier to work with in Python

Improved spice upgrade behavior​

The Spice.ai CLI will no longer recommend "upgrading" to an older version. An issue was also fixed where trying to upgrade the Spice.ai CLI using spice upgrade on Linux would return an error.

New in this release​

• Adds a new learning algorithm called "Soft-Actor Critic" (SAC).
• Updates the reward function parameters for the YAML code blocks from prev_state and new_state to current_state and next_state to be consistent with the reward function files.
• Fixes an issue where editing a reward functions file would not automatically trigger training.
• Fixes the normalization of values for the Deep-Q Learning algorithm to handle larger values.
• Fixes an issue where the Spice.ai CLI would not upgrade on Linux with the spice upgrade command.
• Fixes an issue where the Spice.ai CLI would recommend an "upgrade" to an older version.

Resources​

• Getting started with Spice.ai
• Documentation
• Quickstarts and Samples

Community​

Spice.ai started with the vision to make AI easy for developers. We are building Spice.ai in the open and with the community. Reach out on Slack or by email to get involved. We will also be starting a community call series soon!

• Slack: spiceai.org/slack
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/spiceai
• Twitter: @spice_ai
• Email: [email protected]