+1 It sounds like "logic" to me. Today the catalogs are dealing with that "specifically". So something in the spec makes sense.
Regards JB On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 10:50 PM Ryan Blue <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I just opened a PR to add an `unregister` endpoint to the REST spec, > #16400 <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/16400>. Unregister is the > opposite of `register` and allows you to remove a table from a catalog > without deleting its underlying data and metadata files. The purpose is to > allow moving from one catalog to another. > > I think it was just an oversight that we didn't already have this. I know > that we've talked about adding a way to unregister a table in the past, but > I didn't see a previous email thread so I thought I'd start this one. We > originally assumed that the drop table endpoint would work, but we need a > different one for two reasons. First, most REST catalogs take care of table > cleanup (rather than putting the responsibility on the user or engine at > the time DROP is run) and we need a way to prevent files from being > removed. Second, DROP doesn't work for concurrent operations. We need to > return the current table state and metadata location from the `unregister` > operation and have the assurance that it is the latest state from the > catalog and that any other operations against the table will fail. > > Please take a look and reply. If there aren't many objections, I'll try to > start a vote thread sometime this week. > > Thanks, > > Ryan >
