Rare: a table-formats article that doesn't tell you to rip-and-replace everything for Iceberg. If you work near a lakehouse, it's worth a read. Key points, regardless of what you run: 💸 The format itself costs $0. Iceberg, Delta, and Hudi are Apache-2.0. You pay for compute, storage, and the platform—so the real question is engine economics for your workload.

🧬 They came from different problems, and that still shows: Iceberg (Netflix append analytics), Delta (Spark/Databricks), Hudi (Uber streaming + frequent updates). 🔄 In Databricks and Fabric, Delta is effectively an optimized, Iceberg-compatible path. With UniForm, it can present an Iceberg interface, and is often cheaper/easier than "rolling your own Iceberg." "Move everything to Iceberg" is often a fake mandate.

@byte_array Um yeah but what about @apachextable ? Wasn’t that supposed to be the grand unifying layer for all this?