‹ Back to courses
course: Apache Iceberg™️

Data Types and Schema Evolution

13 min
Untitled design (21)

Tim Berglund

VP Developer Relations

Gilles Philippart profile picture (round 128px)

Gilles Philippart

Software Practice Lead

Tim Berglund explores how Apache Iceberg turns schema evolution from a painful migration into a fast, metadata-only update. This episode details how Iceberg tracks columns by ID to safely add, drop, rename, widen, and reorder fields without rewriting data or breaking historical queries. He also covers Iceberg v3’s new types: variant for semi-structured JSON, native geometry/geography for geospatial analytics, and nanosecond-precision timestamps which enables analytics scenarios that are awkward or impractical in traditional data lakes.

Do you have questions or comments? Join us in the #developer-confluent-io community Slack channel to engage in discussions with the creators of this content.

Get started with Confluent Cloud

Try free

Total 19

  1. Introduction
    2 min
  2. Architecture and Concepts
    9 min
  3. Catalog
    6 min
  4. Hands-on Exercise: Catalog
  5. ACID Transactions
    13 min
  6. Updates and Deletes
    15 min
  7. Data Types and Schema Evolution
    13 min
  8. Hands-on Exercise: Schema Evolution
  9. Partitioning and Partition Evolution
    11 min
  10. Hands-on Exercise: Partitioning
  11. Clustering
    6 min
  12. Time Travel and Rollback
    10 min
  13. Hands-On Exercise: Time Travel
  14. Tagging and Branching
    15 min
  15. Hands-On Exercise: Tagging and Branching
  16. Metadata Tables
    10 min
  17. Table Maintenance
    12 min
  18. Hands-On Exercise: Table Maintenance
  19. Query Engines and Ecosystem
    5 min

Be the first to get updates and new content

We will only share developer content and updates, including notifications when new content is added. We will never send you sales emails. 🙂 By subscribing, you understand we will process your personal information in accordance with our Privacy Statement.