Variant Shredding Explained: How Iceberg Gets Columnar Performance From Messy JSON
Variant shredding turns messy JSON into Parquet columns with statistics. How the layout works, how readers reassemble values, and why some queries prune.
The archive
Writing, page 10
652 posts on Apache Iceberg, lakehouse architecture, data engineering and applied AI.
Who Actually Owns an Iceberg Table? Managed, External, and the New Vocabulary of Lakehouse Control
Managed and external Iceberg tables mean different things on every platform. Five ownership dimensions and a translation method for vendor vocabulary.
Mastering Apache Iceberg v3 Deletion Vectors for High-Throughput Streaming Ingest
Apache Iceberg v3 deletion vectors for high-throughput streaming ingest: how bitmaps and Puffin files fix CDC write amplification and read decay.
The Decoupled Data Lakehouse: Multi-Engine Freedom with Open REST Catalogs
The decoupled data lakehouse: multi-engine freedom with open REST catalogs, credential vending, and an estate that outlives its tools.
The Five Layers of an Agentic Lakehouse
The five layers of an agentic lakehouse: Storage, Catalog, Semantic, Gateway, and Agent Surface, and how one question travels through all of them.
Goal-Directed Data Quality Agents: Anomaly Quarantine on Apache Iceberg
Goal-directed data quality agents that watch Apache Iceberg tables, detect anomalies, and quarantine suspect data safely with snapshot isolation and branches.
Managing the TCO of Agentic Analytics: Token Budgets, Query Throttles, and the Economics of Autonomy
Managing the total cost of agentic analytics: token budgets, query throttles, unit economics, and the FinOps discipline that keeps AI spend under control.
Metric Contracts in 2026: Standardizing Business Logic Across Multi-Agent Frameworks
Metric contracts in 2026: versioned, testable definitions of business logic that let multi-agent frameworks compute revenue identically, with OSI interchange.
Policy-Aware Lakehouse Telemetry: Building Auditable AI Records on Apache Iceberg for the EU AI Act Era
Policy-aware lakehouse telemetry for the EU AI Act era: build auditable, immutable, governed AI decision records on Apache Iceberg.
Query Routing at Machine Scale: Multi-Engine Workload Distribution for the Agentic Lakehouse
Query routing at machine scale for the agentic lakehouse: engine selection, acceleration substitution, admission control, and placement.