Past Memory Big Data

Jul 30, 2025 · Big Data

Why Iceberg Is Dropping Positional Deletes in Merge‑on‑Read Tables

The article explains how Apache Iceberg v3 replaces the scalable‑limited positional‑delete mechanism in Merge‑on‑Read tables with compact Deletion Vectors, detailing the performance, I/O and metadata drawbacks of positional deletes and showing how the new bitmap‑based approach resolves them.