Micah Kornfield

Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg™ have converged on similar ideas: columnar metadata for efficient pruning, manifest trees for scalability, and deletion vectors for fast updates. Yet today, we maintain two separate metadata structures, duplicating work and diverging in capabilities. The next major evolution of Delta Lake reimagines metadata from the ground up. This talk introduces a unified metadata architecture where Delta Lake commits store content metadata directly in Iceberg v4's adaptive metadata tree. Delta Lake gains efficient tree-structured manifests and Iceberg interoperability while preserving the transactional guarantees that Delta users depend on. Join us to see the future of lakehouse metadata.