Hey everyone, Following the plan from the 1.8.0 release, I'll be handling the 1.9.0 release. We have several major updates ready:
- *Partition stats APIs:* All core APIs for partition statistics have been merged, unblocking engines like Dremio, Trino, and Hive that were waiting for this feature. - *REST catalog authentication:* The refactoring PR for the REST catalog authentication manager has been merged, improving authentication support. - *Spark 3.3 support removed:* We've officially dropped support for Spark 3.3. - *InternalData support in the core module:* The core module now supports InternalData, leveraging the internal Parquet and Avro readers added in the previous release. This allows metadata to be written in Parquet. - *Bug fixes:* Many important bug fixes have been merged. A 1.9.0 milestone has been created with additional "good-to-have" issues: https://github.com/apache/iceberg/milestone/53 If there's anything urgent that needs to be included for this release, please let me know or reply to this thread. I'm aiming to start the release cut by the end of this week. - Ajantha
