Site: Add blog post introducing the Variant type - #17537
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August 6, 2026 16:02
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The PR check re-ran and failed while Github was having issues. A re-run should fix it. |
Guosmilesmile
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Overall, LGTM. I've left a few minor comments. Thanks for providing the blog!
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| Binary encodings such as BSON store values in binary form, but they still repeat every field name (`"timestamp"`, `"user"`, `"event"`) in every row. | ||
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| Variant is as flexible as JSON but stores data in a compact, typed binary form. Values keep their native types: a timestamp stays a timestamp and a decimal keeps its precision, instead of collapsing to JSON's strings and numbers. Field names are stored once in binary, so there is none of the per-row string overhead of JSON or BSON. No schema is declared up front, so documents of different shapes coexist in one column and a new field needs no migration. |
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No schema is declared up front -> No schema is declared up front for the contents of the Variant column ?
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Seems redundant to me, I'm ok with it how it is.
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Intro blog post on the Variant type in Apache Iceberg: what it is, why it exists, how it's stored, and how to use it from Spark SQL. First in a series; shredding is the follow-up. Put 08/10/2026 as the date to give time for reviews can adjust as needed.
Here's how it renders with mkdocs locally:
