Thanks Prashant, that makes sense. I’m glad to hear you are carrying William’s 
work forward.

If the plan is still to introduce /presign for the plan API response, go ahead; 
I will subscribe to the PR discussion and fold in what comes out of this thread 
as the use case discussion evolves. I agree that we can pool our efforts here.

As noted in the FILE proposal feedback, and in the review comments on William's 
PR where we began discussing FILE governance, I think it will help to keep this 
thread on that use case. What file column usage patterns need, and what SDK or 
spec changes follow from it.

Sung

On 2026/09/15 21:33:52 Prashant Singh wrote:
> Thanks for starting this thread, Sung!
> 
> I wanted to share some additional background on the work already underway
> in this area. William and I opened a spec proposal about three months ago
> focused on supporting file-level access through pre-signed URLs [1]. The
> initial goal was to enable partition-level sharing (with one file belonging
> to a single partition).
> 
> We went through several POCs [2] and a number of community discussions to
> evaluate whether the existing remote-signing and batch remote-signing
> approaches would be sufficient. In particular, the Azure POC [3] helped
> highlight some of the limitations of remote signing across cloud providers
> and provided useful evidence for considering pre-signed URLs as an
> additional access-delegation mechanism.
> 
> The work has two main pieces: SDK support for the /plan endpoint to return
> pre-signed URLs [4], and support for obtaining/refreshing pre-signed URLs
> through the signing path [5][6], along with the associated POC [7].
> 
> I noticed that you have opened PRs #18080 and #18110 for FILE-type access.
> The foundational work from the existing PRs, including returning pre-signed
> URLs from the plan API and adding client-side support, should be directly
> reusable for the FILE work. Given the amount of discussion and
> implementation already underway, I'd love to collaborate on building on
> these existing tracks rather than creating parallel implementations.
> 
> Happy to work through this together and make sure the existing work can
> support the FILE use cases you outlined as well.
> 
> Best,
> Prashant
> 
> [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/odof6m2npvktwd51cz8qnrxjv95ws4wm
> [2]
> https://github.com/williamhyun/iceberg/pulls?q=is%3Apr+state%3Aopen+author%3Awilliamhyun+sign
> [3] https://github.com/williamhyun/Azure-SAS-Header-POC
> [4] https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/17457
> [5] https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/17332
> [6]
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WyCnD63t4AIOzCgP3dWug17kZ6NnVxfOMwOEKqZx6ss/edit?tab=t.ez1lkov8k91#heading=h.vjmmhe69p5j3
> [7] https://github.com/williamhyun/iceberg/pull/206
> 
> On Mon, Sep 14, 2026 at 3:53 PM Sung Yun <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > Hi folks,
> >
> >
> > There is already work underway to return pre-signed URLs from a plan API
> > response, which I believe William and Prashant have scoped to support that
> > user journey [1]. As I was reviewing that work, I began thinking ahead
> > about delegated access patterns for the ongoing FILE type [2] work, and as
> > Dan mentioned in this comment [3], we have yet to have a dedicated
> > discussion on access delegation for FILE. So I wanted to start this thread
> > to begin that discussion.
> >
> >
> > Today access is delegated through remote signing and vended credentials,
> > and I believe both can support FILE type access delegation use cases as
> > long as the object is read by a storage client. With multimodal access,
> > the interesting work often happens in other services, for example an
> > inference service, that need to retrieve the objects to run the inference
> > itself, the result of which is then returned to the calling process for
> > further analytics. While we could require that these functions run in the
> > calling process, or that those services act as storage clients themselves,
> > I think enabling FILE reference URLs to be signed so that they are
> > optimized for sharing with other services will help Iceberg's FILE
> > integration plug readily into the existing multimodal ecosystem.
> >
> >
> > While work is still underway on the FILE type discussions to finalize the
> > shape of the Iceberg type, I'd like to start the discussion on what access
> > enhancements would need to be added to the Iceberg REST Catalog spec and
> > its supporting SDKs. I've put together a spec PR based on recent catalog
> > community discussion [4] on pre-signed urls, along with a draft PR that
> > POCs the integration on the client side [5].
> >
> >
> > I'd love to get the community's thoughts on whether client initiated
> > pre-signing + sharing URLs is an additional mode we want to introduce to
> > enable FILE access sharing as we look to integrate the Iceberg client into
> > the multimodal ecosystem.
> >
> >
> > I'd also be interested to hear what other consumer patterns people are
> > running into beyond integrating with an inference service, which is the
> > case I've been designing against.
> >
> >
> > Sung
> >
> >
> > [1] https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/17457
> >
> > [2] https://s.apache.org/iceberg-fileref
> >
> > [3] https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/17332#discussion_r3992139348
> >
> > [4] https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/18080
> >
> > [5] https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/18110
> >
> 

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