Apache Iceberg Metadata Tables: Querying the Internals

This article is part 11 of a 15-part Apache Iceberg Masterclass, focusing on metadata tables that expose Iceberg table internals as queryable virtual tables via standard SQL. It details seven metadata tables: snapshots, history, files, manifests, partitions, and their practical use cases such as monitoring average file size, debugging sort order effectiveness, auditing changes, and building health dashboards. The article includes SQL syntax examples for Dremio and Spark, and covers time travel, incremental reads, and rollback. It is aimed at data engineers and developers working with Iceberg tables for performance monitoring and debugging.