Discover available MCAP recording files. Does not require loading. Returns file names, sizes, durations, channel lists, and message counts. Use this first to see what data is available before loading. By default scans the project directory; pass an absolute 'path' to scan any directory on the filesystem.

Get full metadata, channel details, and attachment list for a specific MCAP recording file. Does not require loading. Use this for detailed inspection before loading data.

Inspect the SQL schema for a recording: topic names, table names, column names and DuckDB types. Does not require loading. Use this to plan SQL queries before running them. Returns a sql_hint with JOIN guidance.

Decode an MCAP file and load its data into DuckDB for SQL querying. This decodes all messages and may take seconds to tens of seconds depending on file size. You must call this before running queries. For large files, use 'topics' to load only the topics you need and 'start_time'/'end_time' to narrow the time window — this significantly reduces both load time and memory usage. Set an alias for multi-recording comparison.

Execute a SQL query against loaded MCAP data. Supports full DuckDB SQL including JOINs, GROUP BY, window functions, and ASOF JOIN for time-series correlation. Data must be loaded first via load_recording. If a table is missing, call load_recording with the needed topic.

Return the server version, supported encodings, and upgrade command. Use this to check for updates or diagnose compatibility issues.