Streaming to Apache Iceberg: Latency Trade-offs and Sub-second Workarounds

Apache Iceberg's commit cadence creates a freshness floor of seconds to minutes, with frequent commits causing small file bloat that degrades query performance. The article maps open-source and vendor streaming paths, noting that metadata overhead and compaction requirements make sub-second freshness impossible without auxiliary systems. For workloads demanding lower latency, it recommends patterns like pre-aggregation or dual-write to streaming databases.