Hi Dan,

Thanks for the summary. When you say "Column Append," are you referring to
efficient column updates[1]?
Besides new features, Huaxin has initiated a discussion about deprecating
equality deletes which remains unresolved[2].
BTW, it looks the video of the last Community Sync hasn't been uploaded[3].
Does anyone know about it?

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDZKzz3PKIk
2. https://lists.apache.org/thread/ks01jpv40qjlvz4yop5tlqv4x5oxbwy6
3. https://www.youtube.com/@ApacheIceberg/videos

Thanks,
Manu

On Wed, Aug 12, 2026 at 6:16 AM Steven Wu <[email protected]> wrote:

> I would like to add one item to the "Table features" that we previously
> discussed and agreed upon [1].
> - Monotonic snapshot timestamp and a new *_last_updated_timestamp_ms* metadata
> column that can inherit from the snapshot timestamp.
>
> I know there is also an ongoing discussion on collation.
>
> 1. https://lists.apache.org/thread/cln7xtjy9kw2096gzqlg5c4gg8b9td10
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 2:42 PM Daniel Weeks <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hey Everyone,
>>
>> At the last Iceberg Community Sync, I raised the topic of opening a
>> discussion on how we want to scope v4 to arrive at a shared understanding
>> of what we want to land in the next table spec version.  Anyone who
>> regularly attends conferences, meetups, or syncs is likely familiar with
>> specific efforts currently in flight, but as a community, we haven't
>> defined what we believe constitutes a cohesive set of capabilities to
>> target for the next release.
>>
>> It's early enough at this point to start a discussion and still have time
>> to include critical features not yet identified or push back anything that
>> may either be underdeveloped or poorly understood.
>>
>> Broadly speaking, the various ongoing workstreams fall into three main
>> categories:
>>
>> *Content Metadata Updates*
>> - Adaptive Metadata Tree (AMT) / Single File Commits
>> - Column Statistics
>> - Relative Paths
>> - Column Append
>>
>> *Table Features*
>> - Check Constraints
>> - Default Value Expressions
>> - Generated Columns
>>
>> *Data Types*
>> - File Type
>> - Vector Type
>>
>> Some have only recently been proposed (e.g. Vector Type and Generated
>> Columns), while others have been discussed for over a year and are well
>> into implementation (e.g. AMT and Stats).
>>
>> While many non-table format discussions and efforts are ongoing (MVs,
>> Indexing, REST), focusing attention on what aligns with the v4 release and
>> communicating the scope and progress of that effort would be helpful.  For
>> the last release, we used a combination of GitHub milestones and projects
>> (some exist for v4 efforts but are currently incomplete/unmaintained),
>> which I believe many found helpful.
>>
>> I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts:
>> - Does this algin with everyone's interests in v4?
>> - Are there features we've discussed that should/shouldn't be included?
>> - Do we want to start tracking progress across these efforts?
>>
>> Looking forward to discussion and feedback,
>> -Dan
>>
>

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