Format Co-Evolution: How Iceberg v4 and Delta 5.0 Share a Unified Metadata

For years, Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg co-evolved as parallel standards. That era is ending. This session goes deep on the technical “how” of this convergence. We first walk through Apache Iceberg v4’s adaptive metadata tree: what is changing in the redesign and how the new structure enables single-file commits to significantly accelerate performance.

We then cover how Delta Lake 5.0 adopts the Iceberg v4 metadata tree as its native content metadata. This produces a single on-disk structure that both Delta and Iceberg clients read and write directly. No translation layers, no conversion overhead. Just one format.