Add Jan update (#29)

* Add Jan update

Signed-off-by: Whelan Boyd <whelanboyd@gmail.com>

* Clean up GPU support

Signed-off-by: Whelan Boyd <whelanboyd@gmail.com>

* Proposed changes Jan 2026 (#31)

Signed-off-by: Adam Gutglick <adam@spiraldb.com>

* Add latest GPU work

Signed-off-by: Whelan Boyd <whelanboyd@gmail.com>

---------

Signed-off-by: Whelan Boyd <whelanboyd@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Adam Gutglick <adam@spiraldb.com>
Co-authored-by: Adam Gutglick <adamgsal@gmail.com>

Author: whelanBoyd

src/content/blog/december-2025.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,73 @@
+---
+title: "December & January Bulletin"
+date: "2026-01-30"
+authors: ["Community Team"]
+excerpt: "Overview of all work happening in Vortex"
+published: true
+---
+
+The work mentioned in the previous bulletin to revamp Array evaluation to be fully lazy was [released](https://github.com/vortex-data/vortex/releases/tag/0.57.0) on January 6th. This happens by converting their execution to an Operator model that evaluates into Vectors (fully decompressed, zero-copy to Arrow representation). As a reminder, this work enables many more optimizations, and also provides unified abstractions for evaluating on
+different processor types (CPUs & GPUs).
+
+## GPU Support
+
+Speaking of, focus is now on support for reading Vortex files into GPUs. To achieve this, the team is
+
+- Adding GPU decompression for existing kernels, as well as some new encodings optimized for GPU; and
+- Integrating with NVIDIA's CUDA toolkit for high performance I/O.
+
+The first supported output types will be Arrow Device Arrays and cuDF, and a few key PRs have already landed.
+
+- Add CUDA kernels for decoding bitpacked arrays on GPU ([#6145](https://github.com/vortex-data/vortex/pull/6145))
+- GPU filter kernel for primitive types ([#6188](https://github.com/vortex-data/vortex/pull/6188))
+- GPU filter kernel for decimals, strings and binary ([#6196](https://github.com/vortex-data/vortex/pull/6196))
+- GPU Scans ([#6199](https://github.com/vortex-data/vortex/pull/6199))
+
+As with all of Vortex, these capabilities are fully exposed to plugins so advanced users can extend and customize for their own use.
+
+## Around the Ecosystem
+
+**DuckDB Labs** published [performance benchmarks](https://duckdb.org/2026/01/23/duckdb-vortex-extension) comparing Vortex (using the `vortex` extension) versus Parquet. Spoiler alert: Vortex reduced total query time by ~18-35%!
+
+**Spice AI** began a blog series about building their data accelerato Cayenne with Vortex and Datafusion:
+
+- [🌪️ Vortex: The Bet on Encoding-Efficient Columnar Storage for Hot Data](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lukekim_datafusion-spiceai-data-activity-7417019189477126144-1TRe/)
+- [🔬 The Research Behind Modern Data Compression & Vortex](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lukekim_datafusion-developers-ai-activity-7417649503291498496-TD5_/)
+- [🤖 Three Data Problems Vortex Solves for Applications and Agents in 2026](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lukekim_vortex-efficient-columnar-storage-for-hot-activity-7419472524750798848-lZC6/)
+
+**DataFusion:** Over the past two months we've released support for DataFusion 51, and then merged support for DataFusion 52.
+
+- Expression conversion is now extendable, allowing users to push down custom UDFs or any other DataFusion expressions.
+- Support for schema evolution between files within the same table has improved dramatically, fixing many bugs and and allowing deeper pushdown over nested structs columns.
+- We now support tables that have more complex arrow types (Like Dict, REE), while also doing less work exporting from Vortex to Arrow.
+- Delegate some caching to to DataFusion's built in caching, allowing users to tune it using familiar configurations.
+
+## Acknowledgments
+
+We want to thank to anyone who has tried Vortex, provided feedback, asked question and filed issues.
+
+The following contributed to the December & January releases.
+
+```text
+Joe Isaacs
+Adam Gutglick
+Connor Tsui
+Nicholas Gates
+Alexander Droste
+Robert Kruszewski
+Alfonso Subiotto Marqués
+Andrew Duffy
+Cancai Cai
+Onur Satici
+Dmitrii Blaginin
+Dan King
+Baris Palaska
+godnight10061
+sherlockbeard
+Frederic Branczyk
+paultiq
+Pratham Agarwal
+Hao Huaijin
+Dave Bunten
+Harry Scholes
+```