Apache Iceberg Eyes Removal of Equality Deletes as Open Lakehouse Stack Debates V4 Spec

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During the week of July 11–18, 2026, the Apache open lakehouse community was consumed by debates over what should be standardized in specs versus shipped in releases. A key proposal from contributor Huaxin Gao called for removing equality deletes from the Iceberg V4 spec, arguing they are costly for readers and block CDC and row lineage features. The push gained traction partly because Maximilian Michels confirmed that Flink's equality-delete-to-deletion-vector conversion work is now fully merged, removing a major blocker that had stalled the idea since 2024. Separately, Parquet closed a vote on a new File logical type, Polaris debated consistency guarantees in its persistence layer, and release candidates were in flight for multiple projects including DataFusion, Arrow, and Comet. Across six dev mailing lists, the community exchanged 268 messages over roughly 80 threads, covering two format-level votes, five release candidates, and a new committer.

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