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2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

Agentic Data Architecture

A six-layer reference architecture for agents on company data: planners, tool boundaries, identity, the semantic layer, ...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

Running Apache Polaris in Production

Apache Polaris past the quickstart: persistence backends, realm bootstrap, replica token signing, upgrades, backups, and...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

What the 2026 Consolidation Means for Open Formats

Tabular, Dremio, and a wave of data platform acquisitions: what changes for teams building on open formats and which gua...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

Context Engineering for Data Agents

Why text-to-SQL accuracy collapses on enterprise schemas, the five kinds of context an agent needs, where each one hides...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

Guardrails for AI on Company Data

The control surfaces that actually contain damage once an agent is fooled: identity, permissions, audit trails, and prom...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

Migrating Into Iceberg Without Moving Data

add_files, snapshot, and migrate compared: the three in-place paths into Iceberg, the reconciliation each requires, the ...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

What Iceberg Table Maintenance Actually Costs

A cost model for compaction, snapshot expiry, orphan cleanup, and manifest rewriting: what each operation spends, on whi...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

Running an Iceberg Lakehouse on Kubernetes

Catalog, maintenance, and compaction as Kubernetes workloads: scheduling classes, job structure, credential flow, and th...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

Partition Statistics Files in Apache Iceberg

The underused Iceberg metadata for planning: what the partition statistics file holds, what the spec guarantees, how to ...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

What to Assert When You Test an Iceberg Pipeline

Fixtures, in-memory catalogs, and golden metadata: the assertions that catch wrong rows, unsafe reruns, schema drift, an...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

The 2026 Iceberg REST Catalog Compatibility Report

A repeatable test for what an Iceberg REST catalog actually serves, a scoring scheme that separates design from breakage...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

Serving Iceberg Tables From Two Regions

Three multi-region topologies that work and one that mostly does not, what an Iceberg commit costs across regions, and w...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

How Iceberg Catalogs Hand Engines Storage Access

Credential vending end to end: the wire protocol, scoped access on each cloud, remote signing, credential lifetime on lo...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

Kafka Connect to Iceberg: How the Commit Actually Works

Exactly-once semantics in the Iceberg sink connector: the coordinator, the control topic, offsets stored inside Iceberg ...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

What a Query Costs

Four meters, their real proportions, and how to attribute compute to a query, a table, and a team so a platform can answ...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

The Open Lakehouse Explained, Then Built on Your Laptop with Dremio and MinIO

The five layers of the open lakehouse explained, then a lab: Parquet, Iceberg, Polaris, Arrow, and Ossie running in two ...

2026-09-10 • Alex Merced

Where Lock-In Went

The format war ended and exit cost did not: where lock-in relocated after open tables won, how to measure it, and which ...

2026-09-02 • Alex Merced

Data Quality Tooling Compared: Great Expectations, Soda, dbt Tests, and Anomaly Detection

A comparison of Great Expectations, Soda, dbt tests, and anomaly detection, and a layered design that uses each where it...

2026-09-02 • Alex Merced

The Data Team of the Agentic Era: Generalists Owning End-to-End Workflows

The case for generalists owning end-to-end data workflows with agents, the counterargument, and how to make the transiti...

2026-09-02 • Alex Merced

dbt on Iceberg: Incremental Models on Open Tables

How dbt incremental materializations map to Iceberg operations, and the configuration, predicates, and maintenance that ...

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