Hi all, While maintaining Iceberg tables for our customers, I find it's difficult to set a default snapshot expiration time (`history.expire.max-snapshot-age-ms`) for different workloads. The default value of 5 days looks good for daily batch jobs but is too long for frequently-updated jobs.
I'm thinking about adding another option like `history.expire.max-snapshots-to-keep` to keep at most N snapshots. A snapshot will be removed when either its age is larger than `history.expire.max-snapshot-age-ms` or it's the oldest in `history.expire.max-snapshots-to-keep + 1` snapshots. I've created a draft PR to demo the idea[1]. If you agree this is a valid feature request, we also need to update SnapshotRef[2] adding a new field `max-snapshots-to-keep`. Will there be a compatibility issue or too much cost to maintain compatibility? My experiment shows many parsers need to be updated. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. 1. https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/11879 2. https://iceberg.apache.org/spec/#snapshot-references Happy New Year! Manu
