Zero-Copy Mirroring to Open Iceberg Tables
The most expensive part of moving off a proprietary warehouse is usually not the compute contract. It is the copy. Rewriting terabytes of…
The archive
Writing, page 13
593 posts on Apache Iceberg, lakehouse architecture, data engineering and applied AI.
The State of Apache Iceberg v4 in July 2026: What the Dev List Tells Us About the Format's Next Chapter
If you want to know where Apache Iceberg is headed, do not read the press releases. Read the dev mailing list. I say that as someone who…
The State of Agentic AI Standards in 2026: MCP, A2A, WebMCP, OSI, and the Protocol Stack Taking Shape
In 2023, an AI agent was a demo. In 2024, it was a framework. In 2025, it was a hundred incompatible frameworks. And in 2026, something…
The State of Apache Arrow in 2026: Ten Years In, the Invisible Standard Is Everywhere
In February 2026, Apache Arrow turned ten years old. The first commit landed on February 5th, 2016, and the anniversary passed the way…
The State of Apache Parquet in 2026: The Quiet Format Enters Its Loudest Decade
Apache Parquet is thirteen years old, holds more of the world's analytical data than any format ever created, and for most of its life has…
The State of Apache Polaris in July 2026: From Incubating Catalog to the Governance Layer of the Open Lakehouse
I have a personal stake in this one, so let me declare it up front. Apache Polaris was co-created by Snowflake and Dremio, I work at…
The State of Streaming to Apache Iceberg in July 2026: Every Path, Its Latency, and What to Do When Seconds Are Not Fast Enough
The most common architecture question I get in 2026 is no longer "should we use Iceberg." That one is settled. The question now is "how…
High-Performance Columnar Transfers: Combining Apache Arrow Flight and Iceberg REST Catalogs
Modern lakehouse architecture is easier to reason about when you separate two questions. The first question is how a system discovers and…
Block vs. Object Storage: A Deep Dive Into the Foundation of Modern Data, and How the Lakehouse Made the Slow Option Fast
Here is one of the strangest and most consequential plot twists in the history of data infrastructure: over the past decade, the analytics…
The Buyer's Scorecard for Agentic Analytics: Evaluating Tooling in the Enterprise AI Era
Agentic analytics demos are easy to enjoy and hard to evaluate. A user asks a question, an assistant answers, a chart appears, and the room…