Iceberg Is Becoming a Library, Not Just a Table Format
Categories in data infrastructure are quieter than features, and more consequential. For eight years, Apache Iceberg belonged to the…
The archive
Writing, page 3
593 posts on Apache Iceberg, lakehouse architecture, data engineering and applied AI.
Iceberg Is Escaping the JVM: Why Rust, Go, Python and C++ Implementations Matter
The Apache Iceberg release notes I find most interesting in 2026 are not the ones for the main project. They are the ones for the…
The Iceberg REST Catalog Compatibility Test: One Suite of Operations Every Platform Should Pass
"Supports the Iceberg REST catalog" is the most load-bearing claim in the modern data platform market, and it has no test. Every catalog…
Iceberg REST Remote Scan Planning Changes More Than Query Performance
Most of the coverage of Apache Iceberg 1.11 treats remote scan planning as a performance feature. The catalog plans the scan instead of the…
Iceberg Row Lineage: The Feature AI and CDC Workloads Will Eventually Depend On
Every roundup of Apache Iceberg v3 runs the same order: deletion vectors first, the Variant type second, and then, somewhere in the back…
Iceberg v4's Adaptive Metadata Tree, Explained From First Principles
The best way to understand the centerpiece of the Apache Iceberg v4 design effort is not to read the proposal first. It is to earn the…
Why Iceberg v4 Is Really About Making the Cost of Change Proportional to the Change
Read enough of the Apache Iceberg v4 proposals, the design documents, the dev-list threads, the community sync notes, and a pattern emerges…
The Catalog Can Now Plan Your Iceberg Query: Inside REST Scan Planning
For as long as Apache Iceberg has existed, one division of labor held constant: catalogs answered "where is the table," and engines figured…
Can Seven Different Iceberg REST Catalogs Really Run the Same DuckDB Code?
A question has been making the rounds in lakehouse circles this year, usually phrased with some disbelief: someone points DuckDB, the…
Stop Flattening Your JSON: How Iceberg Variant Changes Semi-Structured Analytics
Somewhere in your company there is a table with a column named payload, properties, rawevent, or extra, and inside it lives JSON stored as…