Iceberg is working hard to support pure python[0] / rust[1] workflows without Spark. Following Tabular's acquisition [2], I hope it still moves in this direction at the same clip (very impressed with the speed of development on pyiceberg).
We're using iceberg + duckdb to power analytics in our app[3] and I'm really happy with the combo.
0 - https://github.com/apache/iceberg-python
1 - https://github.com/apache/iceberg-rust