A high-performance, multimodal-native engine for AI workloads
Vane unifies multimodal data, intelligence, and continuous learning with Python and SQL interfaces, seamlessly scaling from local environments to Ray clusters.
Note
Project status
- Vane Data — Supports most of the capabilities described below and is under active development, but is not yet production-ready. Its interfaces and internals may continue to evolve as the codebase is reviewed and hardened.
- Vane RL and Vane Agent — In the early stages of design and implementation. Their source code will be released in future updates.
- Vibe Coding and Agentic Engineering — Some parts of our system were initially built through Vibe Coding. We are now continuously analyzing, understanding, and improving the codebase, applying an Agentic Engineering approach to drive iterative optimization and enhance the quality, maintainability, and efficiency of the system.
Vane Data is a high-performance, multimodal-native data engine for AI workloads. Built on a fork of DuckDB, it extends the core execution engine with native multimodal processing and a unified framework for local and distributed execution.
- Multimodal-native processing — Process images, video, audio, text, documents, events, sensor data, and tables through a unified type system. Dynamic batching and backpressure control handle variations in data size and computational cost.
- Python and SQL interfaces — Build data and AI pipelines with DuckDB SQL or the Python Relation API.
- Built-in AI operations — Invoke LLMs, generate embeddings, and run batch inference through OpenAI and Anthropic APIs or native vLLM integration. Prefix-aware bucketing improves vLLM prefix-cache hit rates and inference throughput.
- Heterogeneous execution — Overlap CPU, GPU, I/O, and model inference workloads through asynchronous scheduling.
- Local-to-cloud execution — Run the same pipeline locally or across distributed Ray clusters, with a foundation for future edge-cloud coordination.
- Designed for production AI workloads — Build multimodal training-data preprocessing pipelines and enterprise-scale batch inference workflows.
Vane supports Python 3.10 through 3.14. Python 3.12 is recommended and is the primary development version.
Install the vane-ai package from PyPI:
pip install vane-aiVane owns only the vane Python namespace. It does not install duckdb,
_duckdb, or adbc_driver_duckdb, so the official duckdb distribution can
be installed in the same environment and both engines can be imported in the
same process. Vane code must use import vane; import duckdb always refers
to the separately installed official package. Vane does not provide a legacy
duckdb alias or fall back to an official DuckDB native module.
import duckdb
import vane
assert vane.connect().execute("SELECT 42").fetchone() == (42,)
assert duckdb.connect().execute("SELECT 43").fetchone() == (43,)Vane's ADBC driver is exposed as vane.adbc; the official driver's
adbc_driver_duckdb namespace remains owned by the official distribution.
Install adbc-driver-manager (also included by vane-ai[all]) to use either
ADBC facade.
Optional features are provided as extras:
pip install 'vane-ai[openai]' # OpenAI provider (anthropic / google / transformers / vllm likewise)
pip install 'vane-ai[image]' # ndarray image inputs for AI providers (Pillow)
pip install 'vane-ai[video]' # video data source (Pillow, psutil, decord)The video extra installs decord on Linux x86-64, Vane's currently supported native platform. decord itself publishes no wheels for modern Python on macOS or for any ARM platform; if Vane adds Windows support later, decord's existing win_amd64 wheel can be enabled explicitly.
For more details, see the Installation Guide.
Follow the Quickstart guide to build and run your first Vane pipeline.
Vane uses the Ray runner by default. If no runner is configured, executing a lazy relation through consumers such as display, result fetching, or file writes selects Ray and may lazily initialize it. An experimental local runner can be selected explicitly before creating connections:
import vane
vane.configure(runner="local")Vane follows Ray's trusted-cluster model: the driver, workers, submitted code, and east-west network belong to one trusted computing boundary. Same-process local-disk shuffle reads directly from the process-local registry, and object-storage shuffle reads committed manifests. Only cross-worker local-disk shuffle uses Arrow Flight.
A worker lazily starts one process-owned plaintext grpc:// Flight service when a local-disk exchange sink first needs it. The service provides no TLS, client authentication, query-level authorization, or tenant isolation. Keep its port reachable only inside the controlled Ray cluster network; workloads that do not trust one another require separate isolated Ray clusters.
Workers advertise their Ray private address by default. VANE_FLIGHT_BIND_HOST may select a different local bind address, including 0.0.0.0 in a container with appropriate network policy, while VANE_FLIGHT_ADVERTISE_HOST must always be a routable non-wildcard address. The advertised-host override is worker-local: set it in each worker node's environment rather than on the driver or in a Ray Job/actor runtime environment. DUCKDB_FLIGHT_PORT selects a fixed worker-local port; the default 0 lets the operating system allocate one. See SECURITY.md for the complete trust boundary.
Each cross-worker partition read has a five-minute deadline covering its complete Flight DoGet stream. Override it with VANE_FLIGHT_CALL_TIMEOUT_S, or set it to 0 to disable the deadline. The deadline is not reset when a schema or record batch arrives. Query interruption independently cancels an in-flight Flight call, so interrupted consumers release the producer-side stream and its shuffle-file read lease.
Hardware configuration: 1 node, 36 CPU cores, 64 GB memory, and 1× NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (22 GB VRAM).
We use the Ray Data benchmark suite to compare Vane with Ray Data and Daft. The benchmark source code is included in this repository.
The Ray runner targets distributed workloads. The current results are single-node only; validation on the multi-node environments used in the Ray Data benchmarks is still pending.
See the benchmarking page for detailed results.
Contributions and collaborations are welcome. Contribution guidelines and community channels will be published as the project opens further.
Vane is distributed under the Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE for details and third-party attributions.
Vane Data is built on top of DuckDB and inspired by infrastructure systems such as Ray Data, Daft, and Trino.
- DuckDB: The core modular architecture and inspiration. A high-performance analytical database system. It is designed to be fast, reliable, portable, and easy to use.
- DuckDB-Python: The core modular architecture and inspiration. The DuckDB Python package.
- Ray Data: A scalable data processing library for AI workloads built on Ray
- Daft: High-Performance Data Engine for AI and Multimodal Workloads
- Trino: A fast distributed SQL query engine for big data analytics.
Special thanks to these projects.
Give Vane a ⭐️ if it helps you!