Introducing Spice Cayenne: The Next-Generation Data Accelerator Built on Vortex for Performance and Scale Luke Kim December 17, 2025
TLDR
Spice Cayenne is the next-generation Spice.ai data accelerator built for high-scale and low latency data lake workloads. It combines the Vortex columnar format with an embedded metadata engine to deliver faster queries and significantly lower memory usage than existing Spice data accelerators, including DuckDB and SQLite. Watch the demo for an overview of Spice Cayenne and Vortex.
Introduction
Spice.ai is a modern, open-source SQL query engine that enables development teams to federate, accelerate, search, and integrate AI across distributed data sources. It’s designed for enterprises building data-intensive applications and AI agents across disparate, tiered data infrastructure. Data acceleration of disparate and disaggregated data sources is foundational across many vertical use cases the Spice platform enables.
Spice leans into the industry shift to object storage as the primary source of truth for applications. These object store workloads are often multi-terabyte datasets using open data lake formats like Parquet, Iceberg, or Delta that must serve data and search queries for customer-facing applications with sub-second performance. Spice data acceleration, which transparently materializes working sets of data in embedded databases like DuckDB and SQLite, is the core technology that makes these applications built on object storage functional. Embedded data accelerators are fast and simple for datasets up to 1TB, however for multi-terabyte workloads, a new class of accelerator is required.
So we built Spice Cayenne, the next-generation data accelerator for high volume and latency-sensitive applications.
Spice Cayenne combines Vortex, the next-generation columnar file format from the Linux Foundation, with a simple, embedded metadata layer. This separation of concerns ensures that both the storage and metadata layers are fully optimized for what each does best. Cayenne delivers better performance and lower memory consumption than the existing DuckDB, Arrow, SQLite, and PostgreSQL data accelerators.
This post explains why we built Spice Cayenne, how it works, when it makes sense to use instead of existing acceleration options, and how to get started.
How data acceleration works in Spice
... continue reading