Apache Data Lakehouse Weekly: March 10–17, 2026

The open lakehouse stack had one of its busiest weeks in months. Arrow Java 19.0.0 shipped and the community immediately proposed raising the Java floor to JDK 17 for the next major release — a move that would align Arrow with Iceberg's own Java modernization trajectory. Iceberg Rust 0.9.0 cleared its release vote while the Java side opened discussion on a 1.10.2 patch release. Polaris welcomed a new committer and launched threads on catalog federation and a web console. And Parquet saw a bold proposal for a new "File" logical type that could reshape how unstructured data lives inside columnar files. Across all four projects, a shared question surfaced: how should open source communities handle AI-generated contributions? Apache Iceberg Iceberg Rust 0.9.0 passed its release vote, with binding +1s from Kevin Liu, Renjie Liu, and Fokko Driesprong. The Rust implementation has been shipping at a rapid cadence — this is the fourth Rust release in six months — and its DataFusion integration