Optimizing Your Apache Iceberg Lakehouse

Chapter 2. Primary Features of Iceberg

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This chapter details the primary features of Iceberg, starting with the opportunity to commit transactions that make content changes to tables. You will learn how this works despite the underlying data lake files being immutable. We’ll also explore the two file writing strategies for capturing changes.

Table changes are not only limited to data as structural changes to the table definition are also allowed and tracked via metadata. Iceberg ensures that only changes that are compatible with prior snapshots are allowed to be made. These table alterations extend past column types and names to include modifying the partitioning strategy.

You will also understand the features available for working with multiple snapshots. This includes time travel querying and the ability to roll back the state of the table to a prior version. Advanced snapshot features include tagging and branching that can be helpful ...