How Iceberg V3 Deletion Vectors Fixed Merge-on-Read for Streaming Tables
August 04, 2026How Iceberg V3 deletion vectors replaced accumulating positional delete files and made merge-on-read viable for streaming and CDC tables.
How Iceberg V3 deletion vectors replaced accumulating positional delete files and made merge-on-read viable for streaming and CDC tables.
Equality deletes made streaming upserts into Iceberg practical at the cost of read performance. V4 proposes retiring them in favor of deletion vectors with an async conversion path.
An in-depth exploration of iceberg v3 deletion vectors and faster dml