Category: Data Engineering

2026-08-06 • Alex Merced

Apache Arrow Flight and ADBC, and Why Database Connectivity Finally Went Columnar

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2026-07-28 • Alex Merced

Why AI Agents Fail on Raw Data, and What to Give Them Instead

Agents fail on raw lake data because business rules live in people's heads. Data products with semantic contracts fix th...

2026-07-25 • Alex Merced

Freshness Is a Contract, Not a Note on a Dashboard

Data freshness needs to become an engineering contract with a measurable value, an owner, and consequences. How to decom...

2026-07-25 • Alex Merced

The Apache Iceberg Market in the Middle of 2026

A survey of the Apache Iceberg market in July 2026: the state of the specification, platform support, the acquisition wa...

2026-07-25 • Alex Merced

The Whole Lakehouse Fits on Your Laptop Now

Consumer hardware, columnar formats, single-node engines, and the Iceberg REST catalog crossed a threshold: a large shar...

2026-07-25 • Alex Merced

Iceberg's Next Version Depends on Decisions Being Made in Parquet

The Iceberg and Parquet specifications are co-evolving. Several of the most consequential Iceberg v4 proposals are waiti...

2026-07-25 • Alex Merced

Building a Lakehouse That Stays Inside the Border

Residency is a storage location. Sovereignty is who can compel access, who operates the systems, and whether you can lea...

2026-07-25 • Alex Merced

Table Maintenance Stopped Being a Product

Iceberg table maintenance commoditized when every platform started shipping it. What the six operations are, what they c...

2026-07-25 • Alex Merced

Three Vendors Are Rebuilding the Path From Transaction to Agent

Databricks, Snowflake, and SAP are closing the gap between operational databases and analytical platforms through acquis...

2026-07-25 • Alex Merced

What Zero-Copy Actually Costs

Six architectures share the phrase zero-copy, and they have different costs, failure modes, and governance stories. A wa...

2026-07-24 • Alex Merced

The Breakdown of the Open Lakehouse in 2026: Iceberg, Arrow, Polaris, Parquet, and Ossie, and How to Actually Build One

A detailed breakdown of the five Apache projects powering the open lakehouse in 2026 -- Parquet, Iceberg, Polaris, Arrow...

2026-07-06 • Alex Merced

Block vs. Object Storage: A Deep Dive Into the Foundation of Modern Data, and How the Lakehouse Made the Slow Option Fast

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2026-07-06 • Alex Merced

Deterministic Data Engineering With AI Harnesses: Using Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, and OpenCode for Data Work You Can Actually Trust

How to use AI agent harnesses for data engineering without losing determinism, reproducibility, and trust in your data p...

2026-07-06 • Alex Merced

Preparing Your Data Lakehouse for the EU AI Act: Auditable Lineage and Data Provenance

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2026-07-06 • Alex Merced

A Deep Dive Into File Compression: How Data Gets Smaller, Why Codecs Differ, and What to Actually Use in the Lakehouse

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2026-07-06 • Alex Merced

The File Format Renaissance: Parquet, Lance, Vortex, Nimble, BtrBlocks, and the New Physics of Columnar Storage

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2026-07-06 • Alex Merced

File Encryption for the Lakehouse: The Terminology, the Machinery, and the Hard Problem of Interoperable Encrypted Tables

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2026-07-06 • Alex Merced

Open Source Foundations, Explained: What Apache, Linux, Eclipse, and Their Peers Actually Do, and Why Governance Differences Matter

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2026-07-06 • Alex Merced

Operational vs. Analytical Systems: Why the Oldest Divide in Data Exists, What Physics Enforces It, and the Honest Truth About Hybrid Systems

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2026-07-06 • Alex Merced

Migrating Proprietary Warehouses to Open Lakehouses: The 2026 Playbook for Zero-Copy Metadata Translation

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