# Spice Cloud v2.0-rc.2: Cayenne RC, ADBC BigQuery, and Catalog Connectors

## Releases

### Spice Cloud Platform

**Wyatt Wenzel**  
DevRel & Ops Leader at Spice AI  
April 20, 2026

Spice.ai v2.0-rc.2 is now available in Spice Cloud!

v2.0 brings major Spice Cayenne upgrades, a new ADBC Data Connector with BigQuery support, new Catalog Connectors, and a range of developer experience improvements across the Spice Cloud Portal.

Let's get into it.

## New in Spice Cloud!

### Update Channel for Preview Releases

Spice Cloud users can now select Preview or Stable update channels, with Spice apps automatically upgraded to preview versions (including v2.0-rc.2). Head to Settings -> Runtime to try v2.0 before it's GA!

### [api.spice.ai](https://api.spice.ai/) Management API

Programmatic control over your entire Spice Cloud footprint (apps, deployments, secrets, API keys, and organization members) via the [api.spice.ai](https://api.spice.ai/) REST API and a new Terraform provider for infrastructure-as-code workflows. The API supports OAuth clients for external applications that need to authenticate on behalf of your organization, with granular scopes controlling access per resource type.

[Visit the management API docs for more info](https://docs.spice.ai/api)

### Audit Log

Track every change to your Spice Cloud organization - Apps, deployments, configuration updates, and secret management - with a full audit trail of who changed what and when. Available on all plans, with downloadable logs and retention periods of up to 60 days on the Enterprise plan.

Continue reading for the overview of v2.0-rc.2, or check out the full release notes at [spiceai.org/releases/v2.0-rc.2](https://spiceai.org/releases/v2.0-rc.2)

## Major v2.0-rc.2 Features

### Spice Cayenne Reaches RC

Spice Cayenne, the Spice data accelerator built on the Vortex columnar format, has been promoted to release candidate status. Cayenne delivers 1.4x faster queries than DuckDB with 3x lower memory usage on TPC-H SF100 benchmarks.

New in RC2:

- **`MERGE INTO`**: Upsert-style insert/update/delete operations on Cayenne catalog tables, fully distributed across executors.
- **`PARTITION BY`**: Define Cayenne table partitioning directly in SQL; partition metadata is persisted and reloaded on restart.
- **Reliability fixes**: Correct target file size enforcement (default 128MB), and proper primary key and conflict resolution handling for Cayenne tables.

[Spice Cayenne Docs](https://spiceai.org/docs/components/data-accelerators/cayenne)

### ADBC Data Connector & Catalog

Spice now offers an ADBC data connector and catalog for connectivity to any data system with an ADBC Driver, such as BigQuery. It supports full query federation, automatic schema, and table discovery.

[ADBC Connector Docs](https://spiceai.org/docs/next/components/data-connectors/adbc)

### New Catalog Connectors

Catalog connectors for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL, and Snowflake make it straightforward to expose external database metadata through Spice for cross-system federation, using each system's native metadata catalog for schema and table discovery.

[Catalog Connector Docs](https://spiceai.org/docs/next/components/catalogs)

### Apache DataFusion v52 Upgrade

DataFusion has been upgraded to v52.4.0, with updates across `arrow-rs`, `datafusion-federation`, and `datafusion-table-providers`. This release adds strict overflow handling (`try_cast_to` now returns errors on overflow rather than silently producing NULL values), along with a federation fix for Inexact filter pushdown with aliases and improved partial aggregation performance for FlightSQLExec.

[Apache DataFusion Docs](https://datafusion.apache.org/blog/output/2026/01/12/datafusion-52.0.0)

## Additional Updates

- Delta Lake Column Mapping: Name and Id column mapping modes are now supported for Delta Lake datasets.
- HTTP Pagination: The HTTP data connector now supports paginated API endpoints.
- JSON Ingestion: Added support for single-object JSON documents, soda format support (Socrata Open Data), json_pointer extraction for nested payloads, and improved auto-detection across arrays, objects, JSONL, and BOM-prefixed input.
- Per-Model Rate-Limited AI UDF Execution: Control concurrent AI function invocations on a per-model basis.
- Caching Retention: Added retention policies for cached query results.
- DynamoDB DML: INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE support for the DynamoDB table provider.
- mTLS Client Auth: Added mTLS client authentication to the spice sql REPL.

...and much more! Check out the full release notes for details:

[Read the release blog](https://spiceai.org/releases/v2.0-rc.2)