jzhuge commented on a change in pull request #3188:
URL: https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/3188#discussion_r830772491



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File path: site/docs/view-spec.md
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+
+# Iceberg View Spec
+
+## Background and Motivation
+
+Most compute engines (e.g. Trino and Apache Spark) support logical views, 
commonly known as ‘views’. A view is a logical table that can be referenced by 
future queries. Views do not contain any data. Instead, the query stored by the 
view is executed every time the view is referenced by another query. Views and 
tables occupy the same namespace.
+Each compute engine stores the metadata of the view in its proprietary format 
in the metastore of choice. Thus, views created from one engine can not be read 
or altered easily from another engine even when engines share the metastore as 
well as the storage system. This document standardizes the view metadata for 
ease of sharing the views across engines.
+
+## Goals
+
+* A common metadata format for view metadata, similar to how Iceberg supports 
a common table format for tables.
+* The view metadata format specification
+  * Includes storage format as well as APIs to write/read the metadata.
+  * Supports versioning of views to track how a view evolved over time.
+
+## Overview
+
+The view metadata storage and retrieval mirrors how Iceberg table metadata is 
stored and retrieved. The view metadata is stored in a JSON file on object 
storage for ease of tracking the evolution of the view. Metastore continues to 
hold the view object with some properties such as database name, owner, create 
time, last access time and an indication that the object is a view.

Review comment:
       Looks great. Thanks!




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