Iceberg storage engine — implementation plan

Warning

This is not authoritative documentation. It describes a plan of work that is not yet implemented and will change as it lands. Once the work is complete these documents should be removed; the finished system is described by the Iceberg storage engine spec, the plugin’s user documentation, and the repos themselves.

Tactical companion to the Iceberg storage engine spec. The spec covers the design and the why; these are the task handoffs — each self-contained, each landing green, with commit boundaries and verification requirements stated per task.

Critical chain: 1 → 2 → 3 → 4; then 5 → 6, while 7 and 8 float after 4. Tasks 1–4 deliver read-only SQL over externally-written tables; adding task 5 delivers the cold-tier roll-off; task 6 adds self-service DDL; tasks 7 and 8 are performance and observability.

• Task 1: iceberg-cpp spike and CI fixtures — container-first
• Task 2: Plugin skeleton and build integration
• Task 3: Catalog-backed metadata
• Task 4: Read path — planner, executor, cursor, pinning
• Task 5: Transactional buffered append
• Task 6: DDL — CREATE with transforms, DROP without purge, RENAME
• Task 7: Predicate pushdown — a core seam, then pruning
• Task 8: Dictionary tables and time travel