Apache Iceberg
Hacker ApprovedRanked 2 of 3 table formats by recommenders
Open table format many engines can query, recommended for analytics data lakes. Caveat: needs catalog and storage setup, and critics call it immature.
Open table format many engines can query, recommended for analytics data lakes. Caveat: needs catalog and storage setup, and critics call it immature.
32 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 26
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 81%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 26 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 4.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Open standard many engines query
“I use DuckDB/Iceberg combination extensively for columnar data”
Comment from 28 May 2026 in “Just Use Postgres for Durable Workflows” “I would rather have my data on something like Parquet/Iceberg”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access” “with Iceberg many engines can query directly”
Comment from 4 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: Streambed – Stream Postgres to Iceberg on S3, Supports Postgres Wire” - Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access”
Strong analytics performance
“Iceberg is nowadays a first-class citizen in Snowflake, with pruning working at the file level, row group level, and page level.”
Comment from 6 Nov 2025 in “Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access” “Iceberg can absolutely outperform Delta if you're intentional about ingestion parallelism or eve catalog setup”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Apache Iceberg vs. Databricks – benchmarked” “Iceberg ran the full TPC-H suite 18% faster than Databricks.”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Apache Iceberg vs. Databricks – benchmarked” - Comment from 15 Jun 2026 in “The only scalable delete in Postgres is DROP TABLE”
Scales on object storage
“Scaling, backing up, verifying, sharding, distributed access - you name it, it's way easier for object storage.”
Comment from 27 Nov 2025 in “Iceberg, the Right Idea – The Wrong Spec” “It scales as much as the bucket does, so we haven't found a use case we couldn't scale to yet.”
Comment from 21 Mar 2026 in “We give every user SQL access to a shared ClickHouse cluster”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Immature or still nascent
“Iceberg is still nascent - only supporting single-table transactions (at least when we tried)”
Comment from 11 Aug 2026 in “How We Pushed CDC into Postgres” “this stuff isn’t fully mature yet”
Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access” “im not all in on iceberg yet”
Comment from 6 Aug 2026 in “What went wrong with data lakes? A 15-year reality check” Complex setup and usability
“Iceberg is excellent for production data lakes with Spark/Trino, but it requires running catalogs, configuring S3/Glue, and SQL knowledge.”
Comment from 2 Nov 2025 in “Show HN: I built a tool to version control datasets (like Git, but for data)” “Parquet, Iceberg, and other open formats seem good, but they may hit a complexity wall.”
Comment from 31 Dec 2025 in “Readings in Database Systems (5th Edition)” “have been frustrated with the usability of Apache Iceberg”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Quack: The DuckDB Client-Server Protocol” Heavier than alternatives for some uses
“Apache Iceberg was too heavy for our specific low-latency work”
Comment from 8 Oct 2026 in “DuckDB Ducklake” “It is a much better setup than using Iceberg”
Comment from 4 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: Streambed – Stream Postgres to Iceberg on S3, Supports Postgres Wire”
Other table formats people recommend
The two most recommended other table formats, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DuckLake | 36 | 9 | 80% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Apache IcebergThis page | 26 | 6 | 81% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Delta Lake | 5 | 3 | 63% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
31 of the 35 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Apache Iceberg was too heavy for our specific low-latency work”
“Long waited feature is on!”
“use Paimon or Iceberg v3 as your data lake”
“The next step in this journey is Iceberg (and a proper incremental pipeline)”
“Iceberg is still nascent - only supporting single-table transactions (at least when we tried)”
“im not all in on iceberg yet”
“more write-friendly standards-based OLAP backends better than just S3”
“suitable for OLAP use-cases”
“It is a much better setup than using Iceberg”
“with Iceberg many engines can query directly”
“I use DuckDB/Iceberg combination extensively for columnar data”
“have been frustrated with the usability of Apache Iceberg”
“I also can put a Postgres DB in front of Iceberg, add some views in Trino to consume the data and get faster streaming ingestion.”
“iceberg definitely doesnt have the fast-writes story”
“It scales as much as the bucket does, so we haven't found a use case we couldn't scale to yet.”
“It is just a table format that’s well suited for this purpose.”
“Replacing an 11.6GB Parquet file every 5 minutes strikes me as a bit wasteful.”
“Delta, Iceberg should be in the list”
“Parquet, Iceberg, and other open formats seem good, but they may hit a complexity wall.”
“Use iceberg tables for that in duckdb”
“Scaling, backing up, verifying, sharding, distributed access - you name it, it's way easier for object storage.”
“Delta lake and Iceberg do not enforce primary key constraints”
“Iceberg can absolutely outperform Delta if you're intentional about ingestion parallelism or eve catalog setup”
“Iceberg ran the full TPC-H suite 18% faster than Databricks.”
“Iceberg is nowadays a first-class citizen in Snowflake, with pruning working at the file level, row group level, and page level.”
“I would rather have my data on something like Parquet/Iceberg”
“so glad iceberg is becoming the standard”
“this stuff isn’t fully mature yet”
“even partition elimination is pretty primitive. For Query optimizer Iceberg is really not a primary target.”
“Iceberg is excellent for production data lakes with Spark/Trino, but it requires running catalogs, configuring S3/Glue, and SQL knowledge.”
“still good source to steal some ideas”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.