Iceberg vs Delta vs Hudi—what should I pick?

If you need multi-engine access (Spark, Flink, Trino, Snowflake), Iceberg has been the safest long-term bet for us due to snapshot isolation, metadata scaling, and broad engine support. Delta is great inside Databricks, especially for DLT/Unity workflows. Hudi shines for streaming upserts with record-level indexing but can be trickier across engines. Pick one, standardize, and don’t mix formats casually.

Do I really need a catalog?

Yes. Glue, Nessie, or Unity Catalog anchors schemas, snapshots, and permissions. Without a consistent catalog, you’ll strand tables, botch schema evolution, and make lineage unreliable. We typically use Glue on AWS and Nessie when we want Git-like catalog versioning.

How do I enforce data contracts in a lake?

Define Avro/Protobuf schemas and publish to a Schema Registry. Producers validate in CI; consumers enforce compatibility at read and write. Add DQ gates (Great Expectations/Soda) before promoting to curated layers. Version everything and treat breaking changes like API changes—because they are.

What about GDPR/CCPA deletes on object storage?

Use Iceberg v2 row-level deletes or position deletes to surgically remove records without rewriting all data. Keep a deletion log, validate with DQ checks, and schedule metadata compaction. Test on a subset before enabling globally.

We’re a Snowflake shop—does this still apply?

Yes. You can use Snowflake’s Iceberg Tables to query your lake data with Snowflake compute, or continue to curate marts in Snowflake while using Iceberg for raw/bronze/silver layers. The reliability practices—SLOs, contracts, compaction—still pay dividends.

Data-engineering · Oct 3, 2025 · 10 minute read

Stop Hoarding, Start Shipping: A Scalable Data Lake Playbook for Reliability and ROI

What we deploy when your data volume 10x’s and the business still expects yesterday’s dashboards to load.

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Stop Hoarding, Start Shipping: A Scalable Data Lake Playbook for Reliability and ROI

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist