Thank you everyone for joining the call !
Please find the recording attached [1]
On a high level we discussed the following :
- *Deny list vs allow list *:
what does the client assume if a given column is not part of the required
column projection, is it allowed to see that column or not.
The consensus seemed to be having *DENY* as a representation, considering
the allowlist can be huge for a very wide table. This does not dictate what
catalog should be stored while defining its policy, some catalogs have both
ALLOW and DENY.
 Essentially what this DENY list means is what a client *should* expect
when consuming Policy evaluation results.
Note: *DENY* is generally not recommended since it can cause issues
specially lets say a column being added and user getting access to it
automatically but in this case since the policy evaluation results are
coupled with the loadTable request.
so we compute the *DENY* list considering the latest schema that was
present at the time when it was loaded. Any new column being added to
schema will create a new iceberg schema and clients will not have access to
it.
I will update the PR soon with this recommendation (request you all to
please participate)

- *Why Policy Evaluation over Policy Exchange* : we discussed this for a
bit and touched why community has been considering this approach mostly due
to multitude of policy definition / dialects out there and this is
equivalent to vended creds which done based on the grants the users has and
defines clear instructions in a portable way to be enforced cross engine

- *Predefined masks over dynamic mask* : The spec is trying to have some
set of predefined actions mostly inspired by Apache Ranger and there was a
discussion / debate around it and there seemed to support for having both
rather than choosing one of them specially for masks such as nullify / hash
etc.

- *Expression Expansion* : Iceberg expression to be more than predicates
and its expansion to have UDF references (Iceberg UDF spec got ratified
recently), Ryan said he will be taking a look into it soon (thank you so
much !), we debated more on dialects etc additionally from UDF pov

We plan to keep this discussion going. I see some new feedback on the spec
PR [2] will address them and have them added to be discussed more !

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wKszzNtP48
[2] https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/13879#discussion_r2760180338

Best,
Prashant Singh

On Mon, Feb 2, 2026 at 4:47 PM Prashant Singh <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Bumping the thread ^^
>
> Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow
> Meeting details: Tuesday, Feb 3⋅9:00 – 10:00am Pacific (recurring
> biweekly): https://meet.google.com/gwy-jxos-jif
>
> I proactively added some comments in the agenda from the spec PR :
> https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/13879
>
> Best,
> Prashant Singh
>
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 1:58 PM Prashant Singh <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Iceberg rest catalog returning policy evaluation results for fine grained
>> access control enforcement, has been discussed a couple of times in the
>> past as well as recently in the community, we pretty much have a broader
>> agreement on what we wanna do at a higher level but there are still some
>> open questions and details to hash out details for the spec to get ratified
>> [1].
>>
>> I wanted to propose a dedicate sync for discussing these and closing
>> them, the time slot, we got was (Thanks Steven) :
>>
>> *Biweekly starting from Feb 3 (9:00 am - 10:00 am PST),* you can see the
>> same in your dev event  calendar if you subscribe to "Iceberg Dev Events".
>>
>> Please do join, we will keep the sync recorded and capture notes on the
>> doc [2] for this sync.
>>
>> [1] https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/13879
>> [2]
>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iGNydKY7XT1N5Nz056vDPM0P8v0MFymGqNtOlUGUp-c/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.tevndn85fps
>>
>> Best,
>> Prashant Singh
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>

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