How Table Maintenance Affects Iceberg Snapshots

Maintaining optimal performance in Apache Iceberg tables requires regular maintenance due to the accumulation of new versions from inserts, deletes, and updates, which can slow queries and increase storage needs. Starburst offers automated data maintenance features to manage this, focusing on metadata handling during compaction, rolling off old snapshots, and removing orphaned files. The compaction process merges data into fewer, larger files, improving read performance, while the expire_snapshots command deletes outdated versions to minimize metadata size. Additionally, the remove_orphan_files command clears unreferenced files to control the data directory's size. These activities, combined with leveraging metadata on the data lake, help maintain the performance and scalability of Iceberg tables.