Iceberg gets a lot of traction and the integration with Hive becomes more and more mature so it makes sense to start the discussion about making it as the default choice.
However, I feel that it may be a bit too soon to do the switch right now. Apart from performance numbers our Iceberg test coverage is rather limited currently in Hive. The vast majority of tests are running using other formats so before making it the default maybe we should first try to migrate the tests to use that. Moreover, the choice of a default format is tricky and varies from one use case to the other so I am not sure if there exists one that overpowers the rest in every aspect. For instance many people believed that adopting ACID tables for everything was a good idea but soon after users started migrating their workloads to ACID we started hitting many performance and scalability challenges. The same reasoning applies for choices/debates between ORC, Parquet, etc . All in all, I wouldn't push very hard for one particular format and I would prefer to leave the choice to the end-user who knows best their use case. Having said that I am willing to follow and support the decision of the community especially those people who contributed significantly to the Iceberg integration. Best, Stamatis On Wed, Apr 9, 2025, 4:08 PM Denys Kuzmenko <dkuzme...@apache.org> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm a bit hesitant switching to Iceberg as the default atm. I lean more > toward setting the default table format at the database level instead. > > Hive Iceberg currently lacks automatic table maintenance, comprehensive > support for partition-level statistics, and various partition-aware > optimizations (see HIVE-28410) > > Moreover, we haven't conducted any performance testing so far. It would be > helpful to first assess where we currently stand before making a final > decision. > > Regards, > Denys > >
