v0.18.1

Added

• VortexWriter accepts a Utf8 column as its UTF-8 bytes (byte[][]), skipping the per-string encoding; malformed UTF-8 is rejected. (#590)

Changed

• Breaking: SQL identifiers are quoted with double quotes, as IntelliJ and DBeaver generate them, instead of back-ticks, so opening a table or sorting its grid works; write "date" where you wrote `date`. (#588)
• Breaking: the ScanIterator constructor and the reader's Pco helpers (PcoTansDecoder, PcoBin, LeBitReader) are no longer public, and the built-in extension codecs are reached only through their INSTANCE. (4ba6ea12)
• CSV import is about 40% faster: it parses bytes instead of Strings and overlaps parsing with writing; the delimiter must be an ASCII character. (#590)
• SQL ORDER BY ... LIMIT on a string column is up to 3 times faster: rows that cannot make the top are ranked by their bytes without building a String, and a chunk stored in the opposite order is read backward. (#575)

Fixed

• A dictionary-encoded string column written for a target before core2026.08.0 orders its min/max by UTF-8 bytes, as Rust does, not UTF-16. (#590)