Unity Catalog 0.7, Paimon 2.1, Hudi 1.1.2, Arrow 26.0, and new ASF top-level projects
This Week in Open LakehouseShow Notes
Scott Haines and Lisa Cao are back after a flu-delayed skip, just in time for Week 42 — which, yes, is our favorite week - "Hitchhiker’s Guide" week. We tear through a stacked open lakehouse release week, led by Unity Catalog 0.7.0, shipping native Iceberg REST catalog support, with Paimon, Hudi, Arrow, MLflow, and OmniGent close behind. In this episode Cold open / Week 42. Scott had the flu, last week vanished into the void, and the “answer to life, the universe, and the open lakehouse” ... Unity Catalog 0.7.0. Native Iceberg REST catalog support, plus a playground so you can try classic Unity Catalog and the new Iceberg path without assembling a lab from spare parts. Production hardening. Live, ready, and metrics endpoints; multi-instance setups behind a load balancer; Spark support through 4.1, with 4.2 still waiting on upstream Iceberg. Apache Paimon 2.1.0. Multimodal and table-format upgrades: scan planning, Arrow reads/writes, blob collections, variant updates, indexes, and full-text search. Iceberg compatibility, no shortcuts. Paimon stays aligned with Iceberg’s published type model — including the fussy bits, like nanosecond timestamps and variant. Apache Hudi 1.1.2. Stronger Apache Flink streaming merge-on-read, 19 backported fixes, and a Flink upsert bug fix that keeps writes from quietly going missing. Apache Kafka 4.2.2. A short stop: mostly a performance-oriented release. Apache Arrow 26.0.0. The vote passed, the release is official, and Jeffrey Vo joins the PMC. MLflow 3.17.1 and 3.17.2. Decision API support, custom judges, evaluation lineage, and UI fixes for Claude Code OpenTelemetry traces. OmniGent 0.18. Bring-your-own-agents, web reading that turns pages into clean markdown, plus GitLab MR and Azure DevOps PR integrations. Community, the Apache Way, and how not to land a 4,000-line first PR The back half leaves the changelog and talks about project health: incubator graduation, contributor onboarding, CI cost, release management, and why credibility in a community still beats dropping a giant patch on day one. Lisa also flags three new ASF top-level projects: Apache Auron — a native, Rust-powered accelerator for big data query engines Apache Reqsign — a lightweight signer for cloud storage HTTP requests, without hauling around vendor SDKs Apache ResilientDB — a modular, permissioned blockchain framework built on Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus
More from This Week in Open Lakehouse
In this episode, Lisa and Scott cover a dense week of open-source data infrastructure updates from Community Over Code and Data and AI Weekend. They explore new release activity across the lakehouse stack, the growing role of AI agents and policy enforcement, and the emerging standards that will shape multimodal and AI workloads. The discussion highlights the differences between hybrid and native table architectures, standardization of decimal precision and vectors, and the critical need for traceability and guardrails in agent systems. Unity Catalog 0.7, native Iceberg support, Kubernetes-style endpoints, metrics, and batch loading for large schemas Delta Lake 4.4.1, catalog-managed maintenance operations, metadata cleanup, column mapping removal, and automatic log cleanup Table-format architectures, native versus hybrid support, and Delta and Iceberg workload management Apache Arrow 26.0.0, Python compatibility updates, Parquet reader flexibility, DLPack 1.3, and the Flight SQL ODBC driver Apache Parquet, vector logical types, embedding-native storage, deck float, and decimal precision standards MLflow 3.17.0, judged feedback, fine-grained permissions, rollups, evaluation lineage, and run restore support Omnigent 0.17.0, OIDC sign-in, policy engine updates, session-aware controls, and agent sandboxing Data Fusion Comet 1.10, native Iceberg writes, Spark 4 support, and native shuffle Ballista improvements, memory management, AQE, higher broadcast thresholds, and handling large I/O-heavy jobs Agent governance, contextual policy enforcement, traceability, evaluation lineage, and behavioral guardrails Iceberg REST catalog, user agent support, and identity management Apache Hudi, vector search support, and semantic storage choices
In this episode, Lisa and Scott explore the latest developments across the open data ecosystem, including Delta Rust, Apache Iceberg, Apache Spark, Rust-native infrastructure, and the challenges of keeping rapidly evolving technologies interoperable. They discuss release velocity, governance, security, schema evolution, standardization, and the maintenance work required to make open-source innovation reliable in production. Delta Rust 1.0, DataFusion integration, column mapping, schema evolution, and reduced JVM dependencies Apache Iceberg 1.12, variant types, variant shredding, V4 foundations, and performance improvements Spark security proposals, row-level filters, column masking, trusted execution engines, and policy enforcement OIDC credential propagation, short-lived credentials, identity management, and modern authentication Spark Connect Gateway, proxy-driven architecture, multi-tenancy, routing, rate limits, and observability Rust adoption, modular infrastructure, smaller binaries, faster startup times, and composable systems Interoperability across Spark, Flink, DuckDB, Polars, Arrow, Iceberg, and Delta Schema evolution, column mapping, positional assumptions, nested data, and logical versus physical representations Standardized schemas, shared expression models, JSON representations, and reducing translation layers Release candidates, backports, compatibility matrices, security patches, and the role of open-source maintainers
In this episode, Lisa and Scott explore recent updates in ecosystem technologies including Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Polars, delta-rs, highlighting their frustrations in agent workflows and a potential oversight on the importance of XML. Iceberg 1.12: REST catalogs, C++ support, equality deletes, and interoperability Polaris catalog governance, lineage, pagination, and deletion policies Flink updates, including State Fun deprecation and native XML functions Polars 2.0, streaming execution, lazy frames, and memory efficiency Delta Rust releases, partition handling, correctness fixes, and migration Parquet performance, FastLanes benchmarks, and Arrow’s Intel macOS support AI agent orchestration with Omnigent, Kubernetes sandboxes, Spark pipelines, and thrash detection
In this episode, Lisa and Scott explore recent updates in data ecosystem technologies including Apache Iceberg, Apache DataFusion, Apache Parquet, and the Lakekeeper Iceberg Rest Catalog, highlighting their implications for data management and interoperability.
The biggest throughline this week is format-layer consolidation. Apache Parquet 2.14.0 shipped as a final release, carrying chronological ordering for INT96 timestamps and Variant documentation fixes, while a parallel dev-list debate over versioning semantics and reader behavior for unsupported versions shows the community is actively thinking about long-term compatibility contracts, not just feature additions.