A cost model for compaction, snapshot expiry, orphan cleanup, and manifest rewriting: what each operation spends, on which meter, and how to set a schedule.
Catalog, maintenance, and compaction as Kubernetes workloads: scheduling classes, job structure, credential flow, and the failures that come from the interaction.
The underused Iceberg metadata for planning: what the partition statistics file holds, what the spec guarantees, how to write one, and when it earns its slot.
Fixtures, in-memory catalogs, and golden metadata: the assertions that catch wrong rows, unsafe reruns, schema drift, and concurrent-write corruption in CI.
