Iceberg

In 2023, the question was “which open table format will survive - Iceberg, Delta, or Hudi?” In 2026, that debate is over. Apache Iceberg won, and it won for reasons that have almost nothing to do with its raw performance. It won because it is the only format that both Snowflake and Databricks now treat as a first-class citizen, because the vendors picked sides on catalogs rather than table formats, and because enterprise buyers decided that multi-engine portability was worth more than a small performance edge. ...

The views in this post are my own personal reflections on the data industry, written in my own time. They are not about any specific employer, team, or colleague, past or present, and do not draw on any non-public information. In 2026, the technical gap between Databricks and Snowflake has narrowed to a sliver. Both offer world-class serverless compute, both support Iceberg/Delta as first-class citizens, and both have integrated AI agents that can write SQL better than your average intern. ...