Apache Iceberg in 2026: The Open Table Format That Won
TL;DR Apache Iceberg won the open table format war in 2026 - both Snowflake and Databricks treat it as first-class Iceberg is a table format (metadata on top of Parquet), not a storage format - ACID, time travel, and schema evolution live in the metadata tree Catalog choice (Polaris, Nessie, Unity) is now the harder decision than picking Iceberg itself Every stack layer above Iceberg is replaceable: change engine, catalog, or storage without rewriting data files For platform context, pair this with The Modern Lakehouse Stack 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. ...