Designing Idempotent Pipelines in the Agentic Lakehouse: Eliminating Double-Write Anomalies

This article discusses the critical need for idempotency in agentic lakehouse pipelines, where automated agents, retries, and network failures can cause double-write anomalies. It contrasts Iceberg's table-level transactions with workflow-level idempotency, highlighting common issues like duplicate appends and output files. The article covers strategies such as operation IDs, intent logs, deterministic writes, validation before publication, and handling external side effects. It provides practical checklists for batch and streaming pipelines, recovery procedures, and testing idempotency. The Dremio platform is positioned as a solution for combining open tables with governed orchestration and semantic validation.