Performance and Apache Iceberg's Metadata

This is Part 3 of a 15-part Apache Iceberg Masterclass . Part 2 covered the metadata structures of all five table formats. This article focuses on exactly how query engines use Iceberg's metadata to avoid reading data they don't need. The single biggest performance advantage of Iceberg over raw data lakes is not a clever algorithm or a faster codec. It is metadata-driven data skipping. By the time a query engine begins scanning actual Parquet files, Iceberg's metadata has already eliminated 90-9