Blogroll
Alex writes about the lakehouse, Apache Iceberg, and agentic AI on Data Lakehouse Hub. Search the latest posts from the Hub feed here, newest first.
2026 articles (20)
What Apache Polaris 1.9.0 Brings to Low-Egress Multi-Cloud Catalogs
10/12/2026
Picture a lakehouse that stores Iceberg tables in three places. Raw event data sits in Amazon S3 because that is where the producers live. A finance t...
Schema Pruning and Few-Shot SQL Selection for Data Agents Facing Thousands of Columns
10/12/2026
A data agent works fine in the demo. The demo database has six tables and forty columns, and the agent writes correct SQL for nearly every question. T...
Upgrading to Apache Iceberg 1.12.0 Without Breaking Your Engines
10/12/2026
Your Spark jobs pin one Iceberg version. Your Flink streaming sink pins another. PyIceberg runs inside a few notebooks and a Lambda function, and your...
How to Build a Golden-Question Benchmark for Your Data Agents
10/5/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/data-agent-golden-question-benc...
When a Data Agent Gives a Wrong Number: Incident Response for Agentic Analytics
10/5/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/data-agent-wrong-number-inciden...
Multi-Tenant Data Agents: Serving Many Customers From One Lakehouse
10/5/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/multi-tenant-data-agents-lakeho...
Release Management for Data Agents: Shipping Prompts, Tools, Models, and Metrics Without Breaking Answers
10/5/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/release-management-data-agents/...
Semantic Caching for Data Agents Without Serving Stale or Leaked Numbers
10/5/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/semantic-caching-data-agents/)....
Small Language Models for Data Agents: Where They Win and Where They Fail
10/5/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/small-language-models-data-agen...
Stop Calling Everything Made With AI Slop
10/5/2026
Scroll any comment section under a blog post, a video, or a song in 2026 and you will find the same two-word review. "AI slop." Sometimes the label fi...
Turning an Analytics Question Into a Verified Agentic Graph
9/28/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/ags-multi-agent-analytics-workf...
Keeping Audit Snapshots Alive While Iceberg Snapshot Expiration Runs Every Night
9/28/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/iceberg-tags-regulatory-snapsho...
Twelve Queries That Pass Every Schema Check and Still Return the Wrong Number
9/28/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/semantic-failure-catalog-ai-age...
Why the Iceberg DataFusion Integration Is Moving to Apache DataFusion
9/21/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/datafusion-iceberg-moves-to-apa...
What Iceberg v4's Proposed FILE Type Means for Multimodal Tables
9/21/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/iceberg-v4-file-type-multimodal...
Fast Classification Models, LLMs, and the Apache Iceberg Lakehouse
9/21/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/jev-classification-models-icebe...
How Apache Ossie Is Deciding What Agents and BI Tools Can Ask a Semantic Layer
9/21/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/ossie-semantic-query-interface-...
CVE-2026-73334 and the Trust Boundary Inside an Encrypted Parquet File
9/21/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/parquet-kms-url-cve-2026-73334-...
Parquet Page Indexes and the Last Mile of Pruning in Apache Iceberg
9/21/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/parquet-page-index-pruning-iceb...
How Apache Polaris Plans to Share Iceberg Tables Across Organizations
9/21/2026
> **Cross-posted.** This article's canonical home is [Alex Merced's Lakehouse Blog](https://iceberglakehouse.com/posts/polaris-open-sharing-iceberg-ta...