Hi all,
For those of you who haven't been following there has been some interesting discussion around the proposal for a REST based catalog[1]. One of the primary questions I had while reading it was 'what is the overall goal of the API?'. Given the size of this question I thought it might be better to pose it on the mailing list than to clutter the PR. So I guess primarily for Kyle: what is the long term goal/vision for the REST catalog? Eg what are the use cases and who are the users? Do you see this unifying the other existing catalogs or do you see it as another catalog to compliment existing choices? Additionally, * Is this a spec at the level that the table spec exists or is this an informative PR to agree on the REST api of _a_ catalog? * Is it meant to enshrine the `Catalog` interface into a spec? This came up on a python sync also * Will there be both server and client modules in the iceberg codebase? I would expect that at least a reference implementation of a server would be a good thing but this would be the first part of the codebase that runs as a server instead of as client code in an engine. On the other side an open api spec and a client impl w/o a server sounds like it's missing something. * It may be early to say for sure but does a server implementation imply authn/z, database backends, deployment artifacts and all the other fun things that go into a server side component? That's just a few things I have been thinking about. Curious to see if anyone else has been thinking similarly and very excited to hear your thoughts Kyle. Also very excited to see this catalog develop. The activity on the PR speaks to how excited people are about it landing. Best, Ryan [1] https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/3561
