Catalog, maintenance, and compaction as Kubernetes workloads: scheduling classes, job structure, credential flow, and the failures that come from the interaction.
The underused Iceberg metadata for planning: what the partition statistics file holds, what the spec guarantees, how to write one, and when it earns its slot.
Fixtures, in-memory catalogs, and golden metadata: the assertions that catch wrong rows, unsafe reruns, schema drift, and concurrent-write corruption in CI.
A repeatable test for what an Iceberg REST catalog actually serves, a scoring scheme that separates design from breakage, and the 2026 evidence across seven catalogs.
