rdblue commented on pull request #4018: URL: https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/4018#issuecomment-1030907123
I don't think it is a good idea to throw an exception and disallow `EXTERNAL`. That will break existing pipelines that use `EXTERNAL` in DDL and Iceberg really doesn't fit cleanly into the idea of `MANAGED` or `EXTERNAL`---the concept no longer fits and we can't choose one part of the definition (delete behavior) over another (overwrite behavior). I think there are 2 better ways to address this. First, https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/3056 adds `PURGE` and makes whether to delete data or not explicit at delete time. That would solve this problem because you're not trying to carry some state about whether to drop data through the lifetime of the table. Second, you can use your own catalog implementation and customize this behavior for your environment. Catalogs can be easily plugged in and are the intended way to change policy like this. -- This is an automated message from the Apache Git Service. To respond to the message, please log on to GitHub and use the URL above to go to the specific comment. To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For queries about this service, please contact Infrastructure at: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
