Hi all, With Amazon S3 announcing support for the If-Match header yesterday [0], all the major object store implementations now support a compare-and-swap operation.
As far as I can tell, this opens up the possibility of storing Iceberg catalogs directly on object storage, without the need for a separate metastore, and without violating any of Iceberg's ACID guarantees. It seems the immediate next step is to build an independent Java or REST catalog backend to prove this concept out. Long term, though, the ideal would be to have such a catalog backend be a first class citizen in the Iceberg project. Is anyone else in the Iceberg community barking up this tree? I'm a long term Iceberg enthusiast, but new to the community. I'd very much appreciate any pointers to current or past discussions on the topic. So far all I've been able to turn up is some light chatter from myself and others on Bluesky and Hacker News ([1][2][3]). Cheers, Nikhil [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-s3-functionality-conditional-writes/ [1]: https://bsky.app/profile/benesch.bsky.social/post/3lauesxg3ic2c [2]: https://bsky.app/profile/eatonphil.bsky.social/post/3lbskq3jwk22e [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42240370
