Known Issues Iceberg

Learn about the known issues in Iceberg, the impact or changes to the functionality, and the workaround.

CDPD-57551: Performance issue can occur on reads after writes of Iceberg tables
Hive might generate too many small files, which causes performance degradation.
Maintain a relatively small number of data files under the iceberg table/partition directory to have efficient reads. To alleviate poor performance caused by too many small files, run the following queries:
TRUNCATE TABLE target;
INSERT OVERWRITE TABLE target select * from target FOR SYSTEM_VERSION AS OF <preTruncateSnapshotId>;

Technical Service Bulletins

TSB 2024-746: Concurrent compactions and modify statements can corrupt Iceberg tables
Apache Hive (Hive) and Apache Impala (Impala) modify statements (DELETE/UPDATE/MERGE) on Apache Iceberg (Iceberg) V2 tables can corrupt the tables if there is a concurrent table compaction from Apache Spark. The issue happens when the compaction and modify statement run in parallel, and when the compaction job commits before the modify statement. In this case the position delete files of the modify statement still point to the old files. This means the following in case of
  • DELETE statements
    • Deleting records pointing to old files have no effect
  • UPDATE / MERGE statements
    • Deleting records pointing to old files have no effect
    • The table will also have the newly added data records
    • Rewritten records will still be active

This issue does not affect Apache NiFi (NiFi) and Apache Flink (Flink) as these components write equality delete files.

Knowledge article
For the latest update on this issue see the corresponding Knowledge article: TSB 2024-746: Concurrent compactions and modify statements can corrupt Iceberg tables