¶Changelog

All notable changes to SQL Anywhere are documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

¶0.5.2 - 2026-07-16

The substrate half of the Redis-free stack, made provable: the queue, cache and pub/sub contracts are now executable, CI-verified specs the Askr runtime builds its L2 drivers against.

¶Added

• Conformance-tested storage contracts (substrate × Askr runtime). The queue, cache and pub/sub contracts in docs/contracts/ are now executable, CI-verified specs: sqlanywhere/tests/contract_conformance.rs runs the exact contract SQL and asserts the documented semantics (queue at-least-once claim / priority / delay / dead-letter / backlog; cache TTL / atomic increment / SETNX locks / tag invalidation; pub/sub monotonic tail / cursor / retention). This is the substrate half of the Redis-free stack (epic elyra-2); the Askr runtime (askr/docs/STORAGE_BACKEND.md) now builds its L2 drivers against a proven contract that cannot silently drift.

¶0.5.1 - 2026-07-16

Another chapter, not another product: the everyday storage primitives — a KV cache with TTL, a durable work queue, and pub/sub — shown to compose out of plain SQL over the replicated SQLite engine, with no Redis/SQS/Kafka alongside.

¶Added

• Storage primitives, as chapters not products. A KV cache with TTL, a durable work queue, and pub/sub all compose out of plain SQL over the replicated SQLite engine — no Redis/SQS/Kafka alongside. The cache is a table with an expiry column (lazy-filtering view + periodic sweep); the queue is a table with an atomic UPDATE … RETURNING claim and a visibility timeout (at-least-once); pub/sub is an append-only topic tailed by cursor, carried across nodes by the replication log. New docs/STORAGE_PRIMITIVES.md; demonstrated (sqlanywhere/examples/storage_primitives.rs) and verified (sqlanywhere/tests/storage_primitives.rs, 3 tests).

¶0.5.0 - 2026-07-16

Search, made whole and made honest. Full-text, faceted, vector and hybrid search are unified as one engine, one chapter — not a separate product; real semantic embeddings become first-class via a pluggable Embedder trait (with a worked neural example); and every published Docker image is now smoke-tested on both architectures.

¶Added

• Search, unified as one chapter (not a product). Full-text (FTS5 inverted index), faceted (GROUP BY over the matched set), vector (DiskANN) and hybrid (RRF) search are the same engine composed in plain SQL — no separate search service. New docs/SEARCH.md ties them together; faceted search is demonstrated (sqlanywhere/examples/faceted_search.rs) and verified (sqlanywhere/tests/faceted_search.rs, 3 tests: full-text match, facet counts, drill-down).
• Pluggable embeddings (Embedder trait). Bring your own semantic model (local ONNX/candle, or a hosted API) and feed it into the same vector32(...) storage and vector_top_k search path as the built-in embedder. The dependency-free embed() is now the LexicalEmbedder implementation of this trait; a to_vector_literal() helper formats any raw vector for vector32. Output of embed() is unchanged (back-compatible).
• Worked semantic-search example (examples/semantic-search) plugging a real local sentence-transformer (all-MiniLM-L6-v2 via candle) into the Embedder trait — kept out of the main workspace so its ML dependencies never touch the core build. Demonstrates true semantic matching (finds "the cat sat on the mat" for "a small feline rested on a rug").
• Docker release smoke test. scripts/smoke-test-docker.sh boots a published image and asserts the HTTP API serves a real vector search (vector_top_k over a DiskANN index). Wired into docker.yml to run on both amd64 and arm64 after the manifest is published, so a broken release image can never pass silently.

¶0.4.0 - 2026-07-08

The flagship collaborative, syncable vector index — CRDT offline merge × DiskANN vector search × inline embed() — plus multi-arch Docker images for Ubuntu Intel and ARM alongside the prebuilt binaries.

¶Added

• Collaborative, syncable vector index (experimental). The flagship combination of CRDT offline merge × DiskANN vector search × inline embed(): several devices build a semantic index offline and independently, then merge conflict-free — afterwards every device can vector-search over every device's documents (the index is maintained as cr-sqlite applies merged rows). Verified by sqlanywhere/tests/collab_vector.rs (a doc indexed only on node B becomes the nearest neighbour on node A after merge) and demonstrated by sqlanywhere/examples/collab_vector.rs. Guide: docs/COLLABORATIVE_VECTOR.md.
• Docker images. Multi-arch sqld container images (linux/amd64 and linux/arm64) are built and published to ghcr.io/kwhorne/sqlanywhere-server on each release, alongside the prebuilt binaries.

¶0.3.1 - 2026-07-02

Experimental CRDT offline merge via the vendored cr-sqlite extension — conflict-free multi-writer offline sync, the other half of a local-first stack alongside embedded replicas. Additive and opt-in.

¶Added

• CRDT offline merge (experimental). The vendored cr-sqlite extension (sqlanywhere-sqlite3/ext/crr) now builds into a loadable extension via scripts/build-crsqlite.sh, turning tables into conflict-free replicated relations with crsql_as_crr(...). Multiple databases can be edited offline and merged deterministically by exchanging crsql_changes rows. Verified end to end (two nodes converge; concurrent same-row edits resolve the same way on both sides). Guide: docs/CRDT.md; continuously built by the crsqlite.yml CI workflow. Not yet bundled into sqld or the prebuilt binaries.
• CRDT via the Rust API. sqlanywhere/examples/crdt_sync.rs demonstrates offline multi-writer merge driven entirely through the sqlanywhere client (load_extension + crsql_as_crr + crsql_changes), and sqlanywhere/tests/crdt.rs asserts it (gated on SQLANYWHERE_CRSQLITE, run in CI against a freshly built extension). Prebuilt extensions are attached to releases for macOS Apple Silicon and Ubuntu Intel/ARM.

¶0.3.0 - 2026-06-24

Theme: vector-native edge. SQL Anywhere is one of the few engines to ship native vector search and bi-directional edge replication in the same file-compatible SQLite fork. 0.3.0 leans into that: it turns the vector engine into a batteries-included toolkit for local-first / edge RAG — embed text inline, index it compactly, and retrieve with fused semantic + keyword ranking, all inside one embedded database.

Everything below is additive and opt-in; databases that don't use the new features remain byte-compatible with stock SQLite.

¶Added

• Hybrid search (vector + FTS5). Fuse DiskANN vector similarity with SQLite FTS5 full-text relevance in a single query using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF), so documents strong in both signals rank highest — the state-of-the-art retrieval pattern for RAG. No new engine code: it composes primitives the engine already ships. Documented in the README; covered by sqlanywhere/tests/hybrid_search.rs (3 tests).

• Vector quantization for the edge. The DiskANN index now accepts compress_neighbors=float16|float8|float1bit to quantize the neighbour vectors stored in the graph. Measured on 800×32-dim cosine vectors the on-disk index shrinks 1.9× / 2.8× / 5.5× respectively while search keeps working — a large win on memory-constrained devices. Covered by sqlanywhere/tests/vector.rs (2 tests).

• embed() reference text embedder. sqlanywhere::embed(text, dims) turns text into an L2-normalized vector literal for inline vector32(embed(text, dims)), so you can build a vector column without a separate pre-compute step. Uses the hashing trick (FNV-1a bag-of-words), so it is deterministic and dependency-free. It is lexical, not semantic — for production semantic search, compute embeddings with a real model and store them the same way. Covered by src/embed.rs (5 unit tests + doctest) and sqlanywhere/tests/embed.rs (E2E).

• Local RAG capstone example. sqlanywhere/examples/local_rag.rs is a runnable, end-to-end retrieval pipeline in a single embedded database: embed() → quantized (float8) DiskANN index → FTS5 keyword index → hybrid RRF retrieval. Run it with cargo run -p sqlanywhere --example local_rag.

• docs/VECTOR_SEARCH.md — a why / how / examples guide for all of the above, and docs/ROADMAP.md — direction for the release.

¶Verification

• New automated tests for hybrid search, quantization and embed() all run in CI. Vector search and replication were re-verified end to end (see sqlanywhere/tests/vector.rs, sqlanywhere/tests/replication.rs, and the server embedded_replica suite).

¶Notes

• CRDT offline-merge (cr-sqlite) remains on the roadmap; it requires a pinned nightly toolchain plus build-std and C linking and is tracked as a separate effort.

¶0.2.0 - 2026-06-23

The first stabilization release after the initial fork. Focuses on build reproducibility, full independence from upstream packages, fixing rebrand-era bugs, and getting CI green across Linux and Windows.

¶Fixed

• WASM user-defined functions: corrected a truncated internal table name (sqlanywhere_wasm_func_table) caused by a hard-coded string length left over from the rename. WASM UDFs failed with no such table: sqlanywhere_wasm_func_ before this fix. Patched in both src/ and the bundled amalgamations.
• Native library name: the SQLite-compatible C library now builds consistently as libsqlanywhere.{a,la,dylib} / sqlanywhere.lib. The rename had accidentally produced an invalid sqlite3.la (no lib prefix, rejected by libtool) and a mangled sqlanywhereite3 target.
• Autotools/MSVC build: regenerated autoconf/Makefile.msc from Makefile.msc so srctree-check passes again.
• P0 safety issues:
  • Documented the Send/Sync soundness of local::Rows (SQLITE_THREADSAFE, Arc ownership, single-task RefCell access).
  • Hardened bottomless::Replicator::wait_until_snapshotted with explicit control flow and clear error semantics.
  • Removed a TOCTOU race in namespace fork (redundant existence check before the lock-guarded check).
• Applied cargo fmt across the workspace.

¶Changed

• Full independence from upstream crates.io packages: replaced the external libsql-client (dev) and libsql-wasmtime-bindings dependencies. The bottomless integration test now dogfoods the in-tree sqlanywhere client, and the WASM runtime uses the in-tree wasmtime-bindings crate.
• Renamed the C-binding crate sql-experimental → sqlanywhere-experimental (output libsqlanywhere_experimental.a), removing the last libsql-looking artifact.
• Modernized CI: actions/checkout v2/v3 → v4, actions/cache v3 → v4, replaced deprecated actions-rs/cargo@v1 with direct cargo commands; Windows builds skip the encryption feature (no Visual Studio CMake generator on runners).
• Added/normalized Cargo.toml descriptions and keywords for all crates.
• Documentation links now point to https://elyracode.com/docs/sqlanywhere; source links point to github.com/kwhorne/sql-anywhere.

¶Added

• CHANGELOG.md (this file).
• docs/TECH_DEBT.md — a categorized inventory of the inherited code markers (35 FIXME, 59 TODO, 1 HACK, 2 XXX) with recommended priorities.
• Build prerequisites table in the README (Rust, C compiler, libclang, protoc, cmake) with per-OS install commands; CI installs cmake where the encryption feature is built.
• workflow_dispatch triggers on the core CI workflows for manual runs.

¶CI status

Green on Linux and Windows for: Rust (fmt/check/test/encryption), C bindings, Extensions (vector, UDF, cr-sqlite), and the Makefile/WASM SQLite test suite.

¶0.1.0 - 2026-06-21

Initial release of SQL Anywhere — an embeddable, replication-ready SQL engine built on SQLite, maintained by Elyra.

¶Added

• Complete fork and rebrand to SQL Anywhere across the entire codebase: Rust crates, the SQLite C fork, FFI bindings, bundled amalgamations, and binary test fixtures (WASM modules and the DiskANN vector-index database).
• Embedded Rust API (sqlanywhere), server (sqld / sqlanywhere-server), Hrana remote protocol, replication primitives, and bottomless S3-backed WAL replication.
• Original project README, set the workspace and C-library version to 0.1.0, and published the v0.1.0 tag and GitHub release.