Category: Apache Iceberg

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

Autonomous Table Optimization When Your Query Workload Stops Being Predictable

Autonomous table optimization when query workloads stop being predictable: observing file layout and query patterns, sco...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

Surviving Optimistic Commit Collisions When Hundreds of Agents Write to Iceberg

Surviving optimistic commit collisions when hundreds of agents write to Iceberg: which conflicts are real, commit buffer...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

How Iceberg V3 Deletion Vectors Fixed Merge-on-Read for Streaming Tables

How Iceberg V3 deletion vectors replaced accumulating positional delete files and made merge-on-read viable for streamin...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

How Iceberg V3 Variant Shredding Changed Semi-Structured Data on S3 Tables

How Iceberg V3's Variant type and Parquet shredding turn JSON columns into prunable typed columns, with real benchmark t...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

Reading the Apache Iceberg V4 Proposals Before They Land

A field guide to the Apache Iceberg V4 proposals: adaptive metadata trees, single-file commits, typed statistics, column...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

How the Iceberg REST Catalog Turned Into the Lakehouse Control Plane

How the Iceberg REST catalog became the lakehouse control plane: multi-table atomic commits, credential vending, capabil...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

What Zero-Copy Data Sharing Actually Does Between Salesforce, Snowflake, and Databricks

What zero-copy data sharing actually does across Salesforce, Snowflake, and Databricks: query federation, file federatio...

2026-08-02 • Alex Merced

Apache Polaris 1.7.0 and the Quiet Work of Making a Catalog Trustworthy

Apache Polaris 1.7.0 deep dive: idempotent writes, semantic models, stricter credential vending, orphan cleanup, and wha...

2026-08-02 • Alex Merced

Designing Batch Pipelines That Write Well Into Apache Iceberg

How to design batch pipelines that write well into Apache Iceberg: commit strategy, partitioning, sort order, write-audi...

2026-08-02 • Alex Merced

Apache Iceberg Support Across the Major Hyperscalers

How AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure actually support Apache Iceberg: storage, catalogs, maintenance, governance, ...

2026-07-28 • Alex Merced

Running an Apache Iceberg Lakehouse With No Internet Connection

A practical guide to deploying an Iceberg lakehouse in air-gapped environments: component choices, artifact pipelines, i...

2026-07-28 • Alex Merced

When the Query Optimizer Starts Managing Its Own Materializations

Autonomous materialized view management replaces quarterly review meetings with workload-driven scoring, and it's essent...

2026-07-28 • Alex Merced

Why Iceberg V4 Wants to Retire Equality Deletes, and What Streaming Teams Should Do About It

Equality deletes made streaming upserts into Iceberg practical at the cost of read performance. V4 proposes retiring the...

2026-07-28 • Alex Merced

Apache Fluss and Kafka Solve Different Problems in an Iceberg Pipeline

Fluss puts a columnar, indexed hot tier between Kafka and Iceberg. Here's what it changes structurally, what Kafka still...

2026-07-28 • Alex Merced

Serving Sub-Second Queries Over an Iceberg Lakehouse With a Hot Tier

A lakehouse cannot serve sub-second queries over seconds-old data. A hot tier in front solves it, with consequences for ...

2026-07-28 • Alex Merced

Surviving Commit Conflicts When Dozens of Writers Hit the Same Iceberg Table

Commit conflicts multiply with writer count, and AI agents introduce unpredictable write patterns. Here's how to diagnos...

2026-07-28 • Alex Merced

The Jackson 3 Problem in Apache Iceberg, and What It Means for Your Code

Jackson 3 changes everything: package names, unchecked exceptions, flipped defaults. Here's what breaks, why the engines...

2026-07-28 • Alex Merced

Wiring an AI Agent to Apache Polaris with the Model Context Protocol

The catalog is the right attachment point for AI agents working against a lakehouse. Here's how to wire the official Pol...

2026-07-28 • Alex Merced

Governing Iceberg Tables Across Regions Without Three Sets of Permissions

Catalog federation gives you one authorization model and one audit point across regions. Here's what it solves, what it ...

2026-07-28 • Alex Merced

Federating Oracle With an Open Lakehouse Instead of Migrating It

Federate first so analytics work now, migrate what benefits from migrating, and leave the rest where it is indefinitely....

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