[snthpy]

Thanks for this. I've been following this space for about a year or two and was wondering why Iceberg was more popular in open source.

Over the past six months I got the impression that Delta is pulling ahead in the race as Iceberg is struggling to provide tools for people not in the JVM ecosystem. Delta is a lot more accessible in that way.

[wenc]

DuckDB (lightweight, non-JVM, many language bindings) supports querying from Iceberg now.

https://duckdb.org/docs/extensions/iceberg.html

You still need Spark to generate the Iceberg metadata though.

[nerdponx]

Snowflake is rolling out Iceberg support and not Delta support, I think that says a lot.

[apwell23]

Bigquery too.

[jamesblonde]

I guess you are referring to delta-rs (for Python in particular). An interesting factoid here is that Databricks started delta-rs, and other companies are now driving it forward - not Databricks. I guess it is not in Databricks interest to push the non JVM ecosystem. PyIceberg is catching up. Write support is almost there - https://github.com/apache/iceberg-python/pull/41

[alexott]

As I remember, delta-rs was started by Scribd, not by Databricks: https://youtu.be/2jgfpJD5D6U, https://youtu.be/scYz12UK-OY

[jamesblonde]

I stand corrected, then.