The small writes problem that Iceberg has is totally silly. They spend so much effort requiring a tree of metadata files, but you still need an ACID DB to manage the pointer to the latest tree. At that point, why not just move all that metadata to the DB itself? It’s not sooo massive in scale.

The current Iceberg architecture requires table reads to do so many small reads, of the files in the metadata tree.

The brand new DuckLake post makes all this clear.

https://duckdb.org/2025/05/27/ducklake.html

Still Iceberg will probably do just fine because every data warehousing vendor is adding support for it. Worse is better.