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How Releases Work

Links: Monthly Full Bundles · Weekly Deltas · Parquet Files

ClinVar-GKM releases are hosted on Cloudflare R2 object storage. All downloads are free with no authentication required and no egress fees.

Distribution follows a full + delta model:

  • The complete monthly full bundle — a gzip-compressed JSON file (plus typed Parquet, one file per section) — is published once a month. It contains every variation, statement, proposition, condition, and supporting reference record for that release.
  • A weekly delta is published for every ClinVar release. Each delta carries only the records that were added or updated since the prior release, in the same section structure as the full bundle, alongside a manifest.json that lists per-section adds, updates, and deletes.

A consumer that wants the current state takes the latest monthly full and replays the weekly deltas published since it. See the Consumer Replay Model for the replay model, and the manifest.json field reference on the Weekly Deltas page.

The monthly full is a month-start baseline, not the current week

clinvar-gkm_00-latest.json.gz reflects the last release of the previous month — e.g. the 2026-10 full is built from the 2026-09-28 release, the last one before ClinVar's October monthly cut. It does not include the current month's weekly changes. To get the current weekly state, apply the latest delta on top of it — see the Consumer Replay Model.

Release Cadence

A weekly delta is published for every ClinVar release, typically within 1-2 days of each ClinVar XML release. Each delta lands under deltas/<YYYY-MMDD>/ and is mirrored at deltas/00-latest/.

A monthly full bundle is published once a month, aligned to ClinVar's own monthly VCV releases. When ClinVar posts ClinVarVCVRelease_YYYY-MM.xml.gz at its XML index (early in month YYYY-MM), our clinvar-gkm_YYYY-MM full is built from the most recent weekly release before ClinVar's monthly cut datetime — so e.g. the 2026-07 full comes from the 2026-06-27 release, the last one before ClinVar's _2026-07 cut. That upload writes datasets/clinvar-gkm_YYYY-MM.json.gz and its Parquet month set datasets/parquet/YYYY-MM/, and refreshes the datasets/clinvar-gkm_00-latest.json.gz and datasets/parquet/00-latest/ pointers. Each delta manifest's checkpoint_full records which monthly full its chain replays onto — and because each Parquet month set is retained, that checkpoint's Parquet stays reconstructable after later months publish.

At year boundaries, the prior year's monthly full bundles and Parquet month sets are moved to archives/{YYYY}/ (archives/{YYYY}/parquet/YYYY-MM/ for Parquet). All monthly archives are retained indefinitely.

There is no weekly full bundle — weekly changes are distributed as deltas only. Consumers that need the full weekly state reconstruct it by replaying deltas onto the latest monthly full, as shown in the Consumer Replay Model.