Tag: apache iceberg

2026-07-25 • Alex Merced

Governing What Agents Cost You

Agents break the four assumptions analytics platforms were built on. A practical guide to identity, budgets, semantic la...

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

The Model Class Enterprise Data Teams Are Not Using Yet

Tabular foundation models perform supervised learning in a single forward pass with no training run. What they are, wher...

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...

2026-05-23 • Alex Merced

An In-Depth Overview of the Apache Iceberg 1.11.0 Release

Apache Iceberg 1.11.0 delivers manifest list encryption, the new pluggable File Format API, credential lifecycle refresh...

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 ...

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