Enhancement: Promote analytical projections and column-store table mode

[smiggleworth]

Audit classification

• Type: Enhancement
• Affected subsystem: Analytical and time-series workloads
• User/operator impact: The capability may exist only as Experimental or an unverified path, limiting operator confidence and making production support boundaries unclear.
• Current behavior: The relevant implementation or workflow is not yet promoted to the requested support level; existing behavior remains bounded by its documented status and evidence.
• Expected behavior/outcome: Verify the behavior against explicit promotion criteria, document supported and unsupported cases, and promote it only when the acceptance criteria are met.
• Deterministic evidence: Source-of-truth: the issue's linked repository documentation, tests, workflows, and benchmark contracts; baseline commit afb23d0. The existing scope and acceptance criteria below are the deterministic work record.
• Confidence and support status: Medium to high, based on repository documentation and existing contracts.; Experimental or promotion candidate; not a claimed bug.
• Related tracker: Audit: Cassie engine and Admin UI/UX gap backlog at afb23d0 #1

Scope

Complete the promotion evidence for analytical projections and column-store tables.

Source of truth

docs/experimental-promotion-criteria.md:20-32 and docs/performance-contracts.md.

Acceptance criteria

• Cover DML boundaries, freshness/fallback semantics, restart, rename/drop cleanup, and generation fencing.
• Provide EXPLAIN labels, capacity metrics, corruption behavior, and authoritative-row fallback evidence.
• Add representative analytical fixture benchmarks, including codec and DML amplification gates.
• Update support/readiness status only after common promotion gates pass.

Tracking: #1.

[smiggleworth]

Grouped in PR #44 (#44): promotion evidence matrix records existing local tests, missing same-commit or hosted evidence, and explicit unsupported boundaries. The surface remains not promoted until its row's gates are met.

[smiggleworth]

Local-only acceptance update: analytical projection DML boundaries, freshness/stale fallback, restart, generation fencing, encoded scans/aggregates, corruption fallback, repair, EXPLAIN, and amplification contract tests pass locally.

[smiggleworth]

Full-history re-audit at current main d0874ff: docs/promotion-evidence-matrix.md explicitly marks issue #28 Not promoted and names missing closure evidence. The prior close recorded only a local correctness slice, while the original issue requires promotion evidence and a support/readiness update. Remaining criteria: retained analytical fixture benchmarks with capacity, codec, and DML amplification evidence on the release commit. Dependency: #7 and/or the relevant compatibility or deployment-profile evidence lane. Next action: retain the named evidence, re-run the focused and full validation gates, and update Feature Support only if every common promotion criterion passes.

[smiggleworth]

Current-main re-audit at 8b84ee936986f586567530a2decee949d2b8f14c: DML boundaries, freshness and stale fallback, restart, rename/drop cleanup, generation fencing, encoded scans and aggregates, corruption fallback, repair, EXPLAIN, and amplification contracts have deterministic coverage.

The remaining promotion gate is retained representative analytical evidence on the same commit, including capacity, codec, and DML-amplification rows with trustworthy normalization and deployment metadata. The latest canonical run, 32505662069, failed in Tier 3 before completion. PR #158 repairs that upstream blocker but is not yet merged or evidenced. Issue #5 also remains open because current FSST performance does not meet its unchanged acceptance threshold.

Disposition: keep #28 open. Column-batch analytics may retain its already documented narrow Stable CBM2 contract, but broader analytical projections and column-store table mode remain Experimental. Dependencies: #7 / PR #158 for complete evidence and #5 for the unresolved FSST acceptance claim. Do not broaden support/readiness until both evidence streams have defensible dispositions.