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Viktor Yershov

Viktor Yershov

Senior Software Engineer at Spice AI
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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​