I am very excited about Iceberg specifically (because open-source), but the last time I looked into it the only implementation was a Spark library, and Trino's (formerly Presto, an SQL engine) Iceberg connector had a hard dependency on Hive! It is like the entire industry had a hard time divorcing its MapReduce, Hive, and dare I to say Spark, legacy.

I didn't look into Iceberg since, but plan to, and I am really looking forward for this to develop. We have the tools and the compute power today to deal with data without legacy tech, and not all data is big data either. Consequently "data engineering", thankfully, resembles the regular back-end development more and more, with its regular development practices being put in place.

So, here is to the hope of having a pure Python Iceberg lib some day very soon!