Author: alex merced

2026-08-10 • Alex Merced

The Plan and the Worker: Two Open Specifications for Agent Harnesses

Two open specifications, the Agentic Graph Specification and the Open Agent Profile, turn agent plans and agent identity...

2026-08-06 • Alex Merced

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

...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

Budgeting for Agentic Analytics When Every Question Costs Something Different

Budgeting for agentic analytics when every question costs something different: token economics, query economics, instrum...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

The Five Layers of an Agentic Lakehouse and Where the MCP Server Sits

The five layers of an agentic lakehouse and where the MCP server sits: storage, catalog, semantic layer, MCP gateway, an...

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

Building Apache Iceberg Lakehouses That Run Without an Internet Connection

How to build an Apache Iceberg lakehouse that runs fully offline: storage, catalog, compute, cross-zone transfer, compli...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

Wiring Analytical Queries to Transactional APIs in Closed-Loop Decision Agents

Wiring analytical queries to transactional APIs in closed-loop decision agents: conditional writes, sagas with compensat...

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

Building an Honest TCO Model for Open Lakehouses and Proprietary Warehouses

An honest TCO framework for open lakehouses versus proprietary warehouses: five cost categories, measured numbers, sensi...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

Why Agentic AI Needs a Governed Semantic Layer Behind the Model Context Protocol

Why agentic AI needs a governed semantic layer behind the Model Context Protocol: metric consistency, access control, Ap...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

Moving From Supply Chain Dashboards to Decision Loops With the Model Context Protocol

Moving from supply chain dashboards to decision loops with MCP: sense, decide, act, and verify, with typed action tools,...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

Metric Contracts as the Interface AI Agents Actually Need

Metric contracts as the interface AI agents need: calculation, inclusion rules, grain, temporal semantics, ownership, se...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

Cross-Cloud Credential Vending in Apache Polaris and the End of Permanent Storage Keys

How Apache Polaris vends short-lived, prefix-scoped storage credentials across AWS, Azure, and GCP, and how to retire pe...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

Designing Policy-Aware Telemetry Tables for AI Systems in Apache Iceberg

Designing policy-aware AI telemetry tables in Apache Iceberg: what to log, tamper evidence, retention against conflictin...

2026-08-04 • Alex Merced

Defending the Lakehouse Gateway Against Prompt Injection and Data Exfiltration

Defending the lakehouse gateway against prompt injection and data exfiltration: per-user identity, no-SQL tool surfaces,...

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

A Migration Playbook for Moving Legacy Warehouses onto Apache Iceberg

A dependency-first playbook for migrating legacy warehouses onto Apache Iceberg: snapshot vs migrate vs add_files, four-...

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