Freshness Is a Contract, Not a Note on a Dashboard
An inventory agent rerouted a shipment last quarter for a company I spoke with, based on stock levels that were six hours old. The…
The archive
Writing, page 10
593 posts on Apache Iceberg, lakehouse architecture, data engineering and applied AI.
The Apache Iceberg Market in the Middle of 2026
Two years ago the interesting question was whether your data platform supported Apache Iceberg. Today every platform claims it does, and…
The Whole Lakehouse Fits on Your Laptop Now
A colleague spent forty minutes last month provisioning a cluster to profile a 90 GB Parquet dataset. Startup, dependency resolution, a…
Iceberg's Next Version Depends on Decisions Being Made in Parquet
Follow an Apache Iceberg design discussion about column-level updates long enough and it stops being an Iceberg discussion. The question of…
Building a Lakehouse That Stays Inside the Border
A manufacturer in southern Germany asked me a question during an architecture review that I have thought about since. Their data sat in a…
Table Maintenance Stopped Being a Product
A team I worked with had a dashboard that loaded in three seconds in January and forty seconds in June. Data volume grew 20 percent over…
The Model Class Enterprise Data Teams Are Not Using Yet
A finance team asks which of their 40,000 open invoices will pay late. The data sits in a table with 22 columns: customer, terms, amount,…
Three Vendors Are Rebuilding the Path From Transaction to Agent
A customer changes their shipping address in your order system at 9:14 a.m. At 9:20 a.m. someone asks an AI agent where that order is…
What Zero-Copy Actually Costs
A vendor demo I watched last year ended with a slide that said "no data movement." Thirty seconds earlier, the presenter had run a query…
The Filters We Build: Scams, Slop, and the Search for Signal, From Radio Ads to AI
My grandparents' generation learned to tune out the radio pitchman. My parents learned to mute the commercials and hang up on…