[GitHub] [iceberg] holdenk commented on a diff in pull request #6723: Docs: Separate page for Branching and Tagging

["holdenk (via GitHub)" <gi...@apache.org>]

holdenk commented on code in PR #6723:
URL: https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/6723#discussion_r1117596247


##########
docs/branching-and-tagging.md:
##########
@@ -0,0 +1,218 @@
+---
+title: "Branching and Tagging"
+url: configuration
+aliases:
+    - "tables/branching"
+menu:
+    main:
+        parent: Tables
+        weight: 0
+---
+
+<!--
+ - Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
+ - contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
+ - this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
+ - The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
+ - (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
+ - the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
+ -
+ -   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+ -
+ - Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
+ - distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
+ - WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
+ - See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
+ - limitations under the License.
+ -->
+
+# Branching and Tagging
+
+## Overview
+
+Iceberg table metadata maintains a log of snapshots which represent the changes applied to a table. Snapshots are fundamental in Iceberg as they are the basis for reader isolation and time travel queries. For controlling metadata size and storage costs, Iceberg provides snapshot lifecycle management procedures such as [`expireSnapshots`](../../../javadoc/{{% icebergVersion %}}/org/apache/iceberg/Table.html#expireSnapshots--) for removing unused snapshots and no longer neccessary data files based on table snapshot retention properties.
+
+**For more sophisticated snapshot lifecycle management, Iceberg also supports branches and tags which are named references to snapshots.** Branches are independent lineages of snapshots and point to the head of the lineage. Branches and tags have independent lifecycles with regards to snapshot retention during expireSnapshots.
+
+Branching and tagging can be used for handling GDPR requirements and retaining important historical snapshots for auditing. Branches can also be used as part of data engineering workflows, for enabling experimental branches for testing and validating new jobs. New jobs can write to the branch without impacting the main table state. After validation of the new job, the main branch can be fast forwarded. 
+

Review Comment:
   Yes :) (Although my focus comes from Spark so it depends more on being able to write too.)



-- 
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: issues-unsubscribe@iceberg.apache.org

For queries about this service, please contact Infrastructure at:
users@infra.apache.org


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: issues-unsubscribe@iceberg.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: issues-help@iceberg.apache.org