Hi Yong, It's a great idea !
I would keep the CLI as close to REST API as possible. If we start to have the CLI depending on other parts (like filesystem), I will probably face some challenges like permissions, isolation concern. If we expose some "statistics" in the REST API and CLI use it, it makes sense, but we should not couple CLI and filesystem. Regards JB On Sat, Feb 21, 2026 at 7:57 AM Yong Zheng <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > The current CLI is primarily used to interact with various entities in > Iceberg. Oftentimes, the CLI itself is not very handy after the initial > bootstrap or after entity modification. For example, if I need to look up > how many tables there are under a given namespace or the number of > snapshots a given table has, I would need to switch to a different tool > (e.g., pyiceberg, Trino, Spark) to write some queries or run some > predefined scripts to obtain this information. Thus, I am wondering if we > should enrich the current CLI with a bit more functionality around > statistics to fulfill the following more use cases such as: > 1. Number of tables under a given namespace > 2. Table metadata statistics report (number of snapshots, snapshot size, > number of partitions, etc.) > 3. Table storage location and size > 4. Table current effective policies > 5. Table diagnostics (e.g., too many small files) > > Thanks, > Yong Zheng >
