Jack Eadie

Announcing the release of Spice v1.0-rc.1 🚀

Spice v1.0.0-rc.1 marks the release candidate for the first major version of Spice.ai OSS. This milestone includes key Connector and Accelerator graduations and bug fixes, positioning Spice for a stable and production-ready release.

Highlights in v1.0-rc.1​

API Key Authentication: Spice now supports optional authentication for API endpoints via configurable API keys, for additional security and control over runtime access.

Example Spicepod.yml configuration:

runtime:
  auth:
    api-key:
      enabled: true
      keys:
        - ${ secrets:api_key } # Load from a secret store
        - my-api-key # Or specify directly

Usage:

• HTTP API: Include the API key in the X-API-Key header.
• Flight SQL: Use the API key in the Authorization header as a Bearer token.
• Spice CLI: Provide the --api-key flag for CLI commands.

For more details on using API Key auth, refer to the API Auth documentation.

DuckDB Data Connector: Has graduated from Beta to Release Candidate.

Arrow and DuckDB Data Accelerators: Both have graduated from Beta to Release Candidates.

Debezium Kafka Integration: Spice now supports secure authentication and encryption options for Kafka connections when using Debezium for Change Data Capture (CDC). The previous limitation of PLAINTEXT protocol-only connections has been lifted. Spice now supports the following Kafka security configurations:

• Security protocol: PLAINTEXT, SSL, SASL_PLAINTEXT, SASL_SSL
• SASL mechanisms: PLAIN, SCRAM-SHA-256, SCRAM-SHA-512

Example Spicepod.yml configuration:

datasets:
  - from: debezium:my_kafka_topic_with_debezium_changes
    name: my_dataset
    params:
      kafka_security_protocol: SASL_SSL
      kafka_sasl_mechanism: SCRAM-SHA-512
      kafka_sasl_username: kafka
      kafka_sasl_password: ${secrets:kafka_sasl_password}
      kafka_ssl_ca_location: ./certs/kafka_ca_cert.pem

Announcing the release of Spice v0.18.3-beta 🛠️

The Spice v0.18.3-beta release includes several quality-of-life improvements including verbosity flags for spiced and the Spice CLI, vector search over larger documents with support for chunking dataset embeddings, and multiple performance enhancements. Additionally, the release includes several bug fixes, dependency updates, and optimizations, including updated table providers and significantly improved GitHub data connector performance for issues and pull requests.

Highlights in v0.18.3-beta​

GitHub Query Mode: A new github_query_mode: search parameter has been added to the GitHub Data Connector, which uses the GitHub Search API to enable faster and more efficient query of issues and pull requests when using filters.

Example spicepod.yml:

- from: github:github.com/spiceai/spiceai/issues/trunk
  name: spiceai.issues
  params:
    github_query_mode: search # Use GitHub Search API
    github_token: ${secrets:GITHUB_TOKEN}

Output Verbosity: Higher verbosity output levels can be specified through flags for both spiced and the Spice CLI.

Example command line:

spice -v
spice --very-verbose

spiced -vv
spiced --verbose

Embedding Chunking: Chunking can be enabled and configured to preprocess input data before generating dataset embeddings. This improves the relevance and precision for larger pieces of content.

Example spicepod.yml:

- name: support_tickets
  embeddings:
    - column: conversation_history
      use: openai_embeddings
      chunking:
        enabled: true
        target_chunk_size: 128
        overlap_size: 16
        trim_whitespace: true

For details, see the Search Documentation.

Announcing the release of Spice v0.17.3-beta.

The v0.17.3-beta release further improves data accelerator robustness and adds a new github data connector that makes accelerating GitHub Issues, Pull Requests, Commits, and Blobs easy.

Highlights in v0.17.3-beta​

Improved benchmarking, testing, and robustness of data accelerators: Continued improvements to benchmarking and testing of data accelerators, leading to more robust and reliable data accelerators.

GitHub Connector (alpha): Connect to GitHub and accelerate Issues, Pull Requests, Commits, and Blobs.

datasets:
  # Fetch all rust and golang files from spiceai/spiceai
  - from: github:github.com/spiceai/spiceai/files/trunk
    name: spiceai.files
    params:
      include: '**/*.rs; **/*.go'
      github_token: ${secrets:GITHUB_TOKEN}

    # Fetch all issues from spiceai/spiceai. Similar for pull requests, commits, and more.
  - from: github:github.com/spiceai/spiceai/issues
    name: spiceai.issues
    params:
      github_token: ${secrets:GITHUB_TOKEN}

The v0.13.0-alpha release significantly improves federated query performance and efficiency with Query Push-Down. Query push-down allows SQL queries to be directly executed by underlying data sources, such as joining tables using the same data connector. Query push-down is supported for all SQL-based and Arrow Flight data connectors. Additionally, runtime metrics, including query duration, collected and accessed in the spice.runtime.metrics table. This release also includes a new FTP/SFTP data connector and improved CSV support for the S3 data connector.

Highlights​

• Federated Query Push-Down (#1394): All SQL and Arrow Flight data connectors support federated query push-down.

• Runtime Metrics (#1361): Runtime metric collection can be enabled using the --metrics flag and accessed by the spice.runtime.metrics table.

• FTP & SFTP data connector (#1355) (#1399): Added support for using FTP and SFTP as data sources.

• Improved CSV support (#1411) (#1414): S3/FTP/SFTP data connectors support CSV files with expanded CSV options.

Announcing the release of Spice v0.10.2-alpha (Apr 9, 2024)! 🔥

The v0.10.2-alpha release adds the MySQL data connector and makes external data connections more robust on initialization.

Highlights in v0.10.2-alpha​

• MySQL data connector: Connect to any MySQL server, including SSL support.

• Data connections verified at initialization: Verify endpoints and authorization for external data connections (e.g. databricks, spice.ai) at initialization.