Guides and insights from the LakeOps team on Apache Iceberg,lakehouse architecture, and production operations.
Iceberg tables degrade silently — small files pile up, snapshots bloat metadata, and query latency creeps higher. A breakdown of the nine components every production data lake needs to stay healthy.
Netflix spent years building an intelligent lakehouse — Polaris, Autotune, janitors, and Metacat. LakeOps lets every team build the same — and go beyond — in minutes.
A data lakehouse control plane is the automated operational intelligence layer on top of your lakehouse infrastructure — providing full observability, governance, and control while continuously maintaining and optimizing every Iceberg table and query engine for performance and cost, without vendor lock-in.
Google engineered a multi-layered Iceberg lakehouse — autonomous storage optimization, vectorized native execution, catalog federation, and credential vending. Learn their 6-layer optimization framework and how to build the same architecture with an open, engine-neutral control plane.
Query and write Apache Iceberg tables with DuckDB — no cluster required. Catalog setup, MERGE INTO, time travel, table layout, and when to route to DuckDB vs Spark or Trino.
S3 Tables embeds managed Iceberg into S3 with automatic compaction. Self-managed Iceberg gives full control over catalogs, engines, and maintenance. A production comparison across compaction, observability, engine support, security, cost, and the control plane that ties it all together.
Getting CDC data into Iceberg is solved — Debezium, Flink, and DMS handle ingestion. The hard part is maintaining CDC tables that receive continuous updates and deletes. A practical guide to ingestion patterns, delete file management, and autonomous maintenance.
Slow Iceberg queries almost always trace back to five structural problems: small files, wrong sort order, manifest bloat, stale snapshots, or partition misalignment. This diagnostic guide shows you how to find each one, confirm it with SQL, and fix it — manually or with autonomous optimization.
Iceberg snapshots enable time travel, rollback, and audit — but accumulate indefinitely unless managed. A practical guide to retention strategies, expiration safety, and automated lifecycle management.
