Databricks Ships Iceberg v3 as Format War Ends; Competition Moves to Catalog and Optimizer Layers

Summary

Databricks shipped Apache Iceberg v3 to general availability, and CEO Ali Ghodsi declared that Delta Lake and Iceberg are now very close in capabilities, sharing features like deletion vectors, variant type, and row tracking. This signals an end to the open table format war between the two standards. However, the article argues that the real leverage has now moved up a layer — from the table format to the catalog and optimizer layers, where vendor lock-in becomes harder to escape. While the format question is settled, the competitive battle shifts to higher levels of the data stack.