A Metadata Benchmark of Lance, Delta Lake, and Iceberg on S3

The exploration of the capabilities and limitations of table formats on object storage reveals significant insights into the design and performance of Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, and Lance. All three formats aim to provide atomic transactions and ACID guarantees on top of object storage, yet they differ in their approach to metadata management and transaction handling. Delta Lake utilizes a log-based system with periodic checkpoints, Iceberg employs a rich metadata tree with a catalog-based commit protocol, and Lance adopts a compact Protobuf manifest for efficient metadata handling. The comparative benchmarks conducted on S3 and S3 Express demonstrate Lance's superior performance in terms of commit latency, metadata load latency, and concurrent commit throughput, attributed to its streamlined metadata design and efficient use of object storage capabilities. Lance's approach minimizes metadata size and complexity, ensuring fast and reliable operations without dependency on external catalog services, making it particularly suited for dynamic and agentic applications. Although Iceberg's single-file commit proposal aims to improve its efficiency, the fundamental differences in metadata architecture between these systems highlight Lance's alignment with current object storage performance models, offering a robust and scalable solution for modern data management challenges.

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