🎉 Today marks the 1.0-stable release of Spice.ai Open Source—purpose-built to help enterprises ground AI in data. By unifying federated data query, retrieval, and AI inference into a single engine, Spice mitigates AI hallucinations, accelerates data access for mission-critical workloads, and makes it simple and easy for developers to build fast and accurate data-intensive applications across cloud, edge, or on-prem.

🎉 After 47 releases, Spice.ai OSS has reached production readiness with the 1.0-stable milestone!

The core runtime and features such as query federation, query acceleration, catalog integration, search and AI-inference have all graduated to stable status along with key component graduations across data connectors, data accelerators, catalog connectors, and AI model providers.

Highlights in v1.0-stable​

• Stable Data Connectors: The following data connectors have graduated to Stable:

  • Delta Lake
  • MySQL
  • Dremio
  • PostgreSQL
  • Databricks (mode: delta_lake)
  • DuckDB
  • S3

• Stable Data Accelerators: The following data accelerators have graduated to Stable:

  • DuckDB
  • Arrow

• Unity Catalog Connector: Graduated to Stable.

• Databricks (mode: spark_connect) Data Connector: Graduated to Beta.

• Beta Catalog Connectors: The Iceberg and Databricks catalog connectors graduated to Beta.

• OpenAI Model & Embeddings Provider: Graduated to Release Candidate (RC).

• Alpha Model Providers: The Anthropic and xAI (Grok) model providers graduated to Alpha.

Breaking Changes​

• Default Runtime Version: The CLI will install the GPU accelerated AI-capable Runtime by default (if supported), when running spice install or spice run. To force-install the non-GPU version, run spice install ai --cpu.

• Default OpenAI Model: The default OpenAI model has updated to gpt-4o-mini.

• Identifier Normalization: Unquoted identifiers such as table names are no longer normalized to lowercase. Identifiers will now retain their exact case as provided.

• Sandboxed Docker Image: The Runtime Docker Image now runs the spiced process as the nobody user in a minimal chroot sandbox.

• Insecure S3 and ABFS endpoints: The S3 and ABFS connectors now enforce insecure endpoint checks, preventing HTTP endpoints unless allow_http is explicitly enabled. Refer to the documentation for details.

Announcing the release of Spice v1.0-rc.5 🛠️

Spice v1.0.0-rc.5 is the fifth release candidate for the first major version of Spice.ai OSS. This release focuses production readiness and critical bug fixes. In addition, a new DynamoDB data connector has been added along with automatic detection for GPU acceleration when running Spice using the CLI.

Highlights in v1.0-rc.5​

• Automatic GPU Acceleration Detection: Automatically detect and utilize GPU acceleration when running by CLI. Install AI components locally using the CLI command spice install ai. Currently supports NVIdia CUDA and Apple Metal (M-series).

• DynamoDB Data Connector: Query AWS DynamoDB tables using SQL with the new DynamoDB Data Connector.

datasets:
  - from: dynamodb:users
    name: users
    params:
      dynamodb_aws_region: us-west-2
      dynamodb_aws_access_key_id: ${secrets:aws_access_key_id}
      dynamodb_aws_secret_access_key: ${secrets:aws_secret_access_key}
    acceleration:
      enabled: true

sql> describe users;
+----------------+-----------+-------------+
| column_name    | data_type | is_nullable |
+----------------+-----------+-------------+
| created_at     | Utf8      | YES         |
| date_of_birth  | Utf8      | YES         |
| email          | Utf8      | YES         |
| account_status | Utf8      | YES         |
| updated_at     | Utf8      | YES         |
| full_name      | Utf8      | YES         |
| ...                                      |
+----------------+-----------+-------------+

• File Data Connector: Graduated to Stable.

• Dremio Data Connector: Graduated to Release Candidate (RC).

• Spice.ai, Spark, and Snowflake Data Connectors: Graduated to Beta.

Happy New Year 🎆!

Announcing the release of Spice v1.0-rc.4 🌟

Spice v1.0.0-rc.4 is the fourth release candidate for the first major version of Spice.ai OSS. This release continues the focus on production readiness. In addition, xAI has been added as a model provider.

Highlights in v1.0-rc.4​

• xAI Model Provider: Adds support for xAI hosted models.

models:
  - from: xai:grok2-latest
    name: xai
    params:
      xai_api_key: ${secrets:SPICE_XAI_API_KEY}

• Spicepod Spec Version: Spicepod spec version v1 is now by default. v1beta1 will continue to work.

version: v1
kind: Spicepod
name: my_pod

• GitHub Data Connector: Graduated to Stable.

• PostgreSQL Data Accelerator: Graduated to Release Candidate (RC).

Announcing the release of Spice v1.0-rc.3 🧊

Spice v1.0.0-rc.3 is the third release candidate for the first major version of Spice.ai OSS. This release continues the focus on production readiness and includes new Iceberg Catalog APIs, DuckDB improvements, and a new Iceberg Catalog Connector.

Highlights in v1.0-rc.3​

• Iceberg Catalog APIs: Spice now functions as an Iceberg Catalog provider, implementing a core subset of the Iceberg Catalog APIs. This enables Iceberg Catalog clients native discovery of datasets and schemas through Spice APIs.

• GET /v1/namespaces - List all catalogs registered in Spice.

• GET /v1/namespaces?parent=catalog - List schemas registered under a given catalog.

• GET /v1/namespaces/:catalog_schema/tables - List tables registered under a given schema.

• GET /v1/namespaces/:catalog_schema/tables/:table - Get the schema of a given table.

• Iceberg Catalog Connector: The Iceberg Catalog Connector is a new integration to discover and query datasets from a remote Iceberg Catalog.

Example connecting to a remote Iceberg Catalog with tables stored in S3:

catalogs:
  - from: iceberg:https://my-iceberg-catalog.com/v1/namespaces
    name: ice
    params:
      iceberg_s3_access_key_id: ${secrets:ICEBERG_S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID}
      iceberg_s3_secret_access_key: ${secrets:ICEBERG_S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY}
      iceberg_s3_region: us-east-1

View the Iceberg Catalog Connector documentation for more details.

• DuckDB Improvements: Added cosine_distance support for DuckDB-backed vector search, improved unnest nested type handling for array_element and lists, and optimized query performance.

• SQLite Data Accelerator: Graduated to Release Candidate (RC).

• File Data Accelerator: Graduated to Release Candidate (RC).