Category: Data Lakehouse

2026-05-28 • Alex Merced

The Death of the Data Swamp: Establishing Governance in Your 2026 Data Lakehouse

Data lakehouses become data swamps without active governance. Learn how schema enforcement, catalog stewardship, and dri...

2026-05-28 • Alex Merced

Legacy Warehouses to Open Lakehouses: A Step-by-Step Migration Playbook

Migrating from a legacy data warehouse to an open lakehouse? This step-by-step playbook covers assessment, phased migrat...

2026-05-28 • Alex Merced

Evaluating the TCO of an Open Lakehouse vs. Proprietary Data Warehouses

Open lakehouse vs proprietary warehouse: a comprehensive TCO breakdown covering storage, compute, engineering, and hidde...

2026-05-28 • Alex Merced

Real-Time BI: Enabling Sub-Second Queries on Apache Iceberg Data Lakehouses

Sub-second queries on Apache Iceberg are achievable with the right architecture. Learn how Reflections, C3 cache, and qu...

2026-05-28 • Alex Merced

The 2026 Unified Data Architecture: Reconciling Multi-Cloud Data Lakehouses

Multi-cloud data lakehouses in 2026 run on Apache Iceberg, open catalogs, and zero-ETL federation. Here's what a composa...

2026-05-24 • Alex Merced

Automating Table Maintenance Before Small Files Accumulate

Learn how Databricks Predictive Optimization, AWS S3 Tables, and Iceberg native actions automate compaction and snapshot...

2026-05-24 • Alex Merced

Choosing the Right Iceberg Control Plane: Polaris vs. Unity Catalog vs. Cloud REST

Choosing an Apache Iceberg catalog? Compare open-source Apache Polaris, open Unity Catalog, and managed cloud REST contr...

2026-05-24 • Alex Merced

What Iceberg V3 Advances Mean for CDC Pipelines

Apache Iceberg V3 brings deletion vectors and row lineage that reshape CDC pipeline design. Learn what these features me...

2026-05-24 • Alex Merced

When Paimon Beats Iceberg for Mutable Streams

Apache Paimon uses LSM-Tree storage for native CDC upserts without restart. Learn when Paimon outperforms Iceberg for hi...

2026-05-24 • Alex Merced

Real-Time Lakehouse Patterns with Apache Flink and Iceberg

Learn how to build a real-time lakehouse with Apache Flink 2.1 and the Dynamic Iceberg Sink, covering schema evolution, ...

2026-04-29 • Alex Merced

What Are Table Formats and Why Were They Needed?

Table formats like Apache Iceberg solved the ACID, schema, and performance problems that turned data lakes into data swa...

2026-04-29 • Alex Merced

The Metadata Structure of Modern Table Formats

Iceberg uses a metadata tree, Delta Lake uses a transaction log, Hudi uses a timeline. Here is exactly how each format o...

2026-04-29 • Alex Merced

Performance and Apache Iceberg's Metadata

Iceberg's three-layer metadata tree eliminates directory listing and enables multi-level data skipping. Here is how scan...

2026-04-29 • Alex Merced

Partition Evolution: Change Your Partitioning Without Rewriting Data

Iceberg lets you change partition schemes without rewriting data. Here is how partition evolution works internally and w...

2026-04-29 • Alex Merced

Hidden Partitioning: How Iceberg Eliminates Accidental Full Table Scans

Iceberg's hidden partitioning separates physical layout from user queries using transform functions. Here is how it work...

2026-04-29 • Alex Merced

Writing to an Apache Iceberg Table: How Commits and ACID Actually Work

Here is exactly how an engine writes to an Iceberg table, step by step, from data files through the atomic commit that m...

2026-04-29 • Alex Merced

What Are Lakehouse Catalogs? The Role of Catalogs in Apache Iceberg

Lakehouse catalogs store metadata pointers, manage namespaces, and enforce access control. Here is the complete catalog ...

2026-04-29 • Alex Merced

When Catalogs Are Embedded in Storage

S3 Tables and MinIO AI Stor embed the Iceberg catalog directly in the storage layer. Here is when embedded catalogs make...

2026-04-29 • Alex Merced

How Data Lake Table Storage Degrades Over Time

Iceberg tables degrade through small files, orphan files, metadata bloat, sort order decay, and partition skew. Here is ...

2026-04-29 • Alex Merced

Maintaining Apache Iceberg Tables: Compaction, Expiry, and Cleanup

Keep Iceberg tables fast with compaction, snapshot expiry, orphan cleanup, and manifest rewriting. Here is when and how ...