Hi Vinish,

I feel that we will eventually have to support this as Iceberg is also
planning on adding native indexing support within the format spec at
some point.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N6a2IOzC6Qsqv7NBqHKesees4N6WF49YUSIX2FrF7S0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hs6r9d26w1y2
So the natural step would be for xtable to handle this index conversion.

Regards,
Rahil Chertara




On 2026/07/01 00:39:24 Vinish Reddy Pannala wrote:
> Following up on my earlier note - a few links didn't make it into the
> original message, so here are the right ones for reference.
>
> Hudi's indexing overview.
> 1. Docs: https://hudi.apache.org/docs/indexes/
> 2. The index implementations in the Hudi source - expression, record, and
> secondary indexes:
> https://github.com/apache/hudi/tree/master/hudi-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hudi/index
>
> 3. The metadata-table index partitions  (files, column_stats, bloom_filter,
> record_index, secondary_index, partition_stats):
> https://github.com/apache/hudi/tree/master/hudi-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hudi/metadata
>
>
> Thanks,
> Vinish
>
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2026 05:19 PM, Vinish Reddy Pannala <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Wanted to float an idea and get people's thoughts.
> >
> > Right now Apache XTable(Incubating) translates table metadata so one copy
> > of data can be read across Hudi, Iceberg and Delta. I believe a good
> > addition for the project is to help engines query that data more
> > efficiently by building indexes.
> >
> > Apache Hudi has a good writeup on why indexes matter - column stats, bloom
> > filters, record-level, expression, secondary, and vector indexes. The short
> > version is that without them, engines end up scanning far more data than
> > they need to.
> >
> > Since XTable already reads the file listing and Parquet metadata during
> > conversion, it seems well placed to build indexes from that same
> > information and expose them into each format's native index mechanism. That
> > would help both structured workloads (pruning, point lookups) and
> > unstructured/vector ones (similarity search over embeddings for AI/RAG use
> > cases).
> >
> > Before going further I wanted to ask the community:
> >
> >   - Is this something the community sees value in?
> >   - Which indexes would be most useful to start with?
> >   - Any interest in vector indexes specifically, given where AI workloads
> > are heading?
> >
> > Would love to hear thoughts.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Vinish
> >
> >
>

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