Spice.ai – materialize, accelerate, and query SQL data from any source
Hi HN, We're Luke and Phillip, and we're building Spice.ai OSS - a lightweight, portable runtime, built in Rust and powered by Apache DataFusion to locally materialize, accelerate, and query data tables sourced from any database, data warehouse or data lake. Phillip and I first introduced Spice on Show HN in September 2021. Since then, we’ve been schooled and humbled in every way building 100TB+ data and ML systems for the https://spice.ai cloud platform. Along with our customers, we struggled with getting fast, low-latency, high-concurrency SQL query within a budget, accessing and…
In plain words
Spice.ai is an open-source runtime built in Rust that pulls data from databases, data warehouses, and data lakes into a local environment for fast SQL querying. It uses Apache DataFusion to materialize and accelerate data access, helping teams run low-latency queries across multiple data sources without expensive infrastructure costs. The tool targets developers and data teams managing large datasets who need quick query performance and cost-effective data access.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, We're Luke and Phillip, and we're building Spice.ai OSS - a lightweight, portable runtime, built in Rust and powered by Apache DataFusion to locally materialize, accelerate, and query data tables sourced from any database, data warehouse or data lake. Phillip and I first introduced Spice on Show HN in September 2021. Since then, we’ve been schooled and humbled in every way building 100TB+ data and ML systems for the https://spice.ai cloud platform. Along with our customers, we struggled with getting fast, low-latency, high-concurrency SQL query within a budget, accessing and combining data from many sources, trade-offs between OLTP/OLAP compute engines, and managing datasets as code. Today, we’re re-launching Spice, completely rebuilt from the ground up, to directly solve several of the problems we had in accessing data quickly and cost-effectively providing it to applications, dashboards, and machine learning. Spice provides federated SQL query across databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.), data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, etc.) and data lakes (S3, MinIO, Databricks, etc.) with the ability to materialize remote datasets locally using in-memory Arrow, DuckDB, SQLite, or PostgreSQL. Accelerated engines run in your infrastructure giving you flexibility and control over price and performance. You can read the full announcement blog post at https://blog.spiceai.org/posts/2024/03/28/adding-spice-the-n.... We’d appreciate it if you check Spice out, give us feedback, and if you'd like to contribute, we'd love to build with you. Thanks! GitHub: https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai
More ai this month
the category →
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
AI · 17d ago · simedw.com
Astute▲585Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · 18d ago · company-app.joinastute.com
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
AI · 27d ago · cactuscompute.com
Launched alongside, March 2024
the whole month →
- 3Y
Life & fun · 2024 · github.com
Microlaunch▲1,116Launch and get feedback on both the idea and product
Dev tools · 2024 · microlaunch.net
