Your Guide to Open Table Formats — Delta, Iceberg, Best Practices, and What’s Next!

Open table formats had a breakthrough year—and now the focus shifts to how to use them effectively.

In this session, we’ll break down what’s new across Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg, including an early look at Delta 5.0 and the Iceberg v4 Adaptive Metadata Tree, which brings the two formats closer together at the metadata layer for high-performance, multi-engine workloads.

More importantly, we’ll share best practices for working across formats today. Learn how teams are using the Unified Delta Kernel (now GA, written in Rust) across Spark, Flink, and DuckDB, and how Catalog-Managed Commits enable safer multi-engine writes, stronger governance, and multi-table transactions. We’ll also cover Auto CDF for building efficient incremental pipelines.

Finally, we’ll highlight innovations for AI workloads, including the FILE data type and VARIANT shredding.

Walk away with practical guidance to build, optimize, and future-proof your open data architecture.