Detect the case to identify missing column from the file using file's max field id in StrictMetricsEvaluator

[manirajv06]

Feature Request / Improvement

StrictMetricsEvaluator eval() should be able to identify missing column and return "not match" (false) if column does not exist in the file. If column's id passed in through expression is greater than max field id from the file, then it means column does not exist.

Query engine

None

Willingness to contribute

• I can contribute this improvement/feature independently
• I would be willing to contribute this improvement/feature with guidance from the Iceberg community
• I cannot contribute this improvement/feature at this time

[RussellSpitzer]

As long as this works with default values I think this would be great to add, I think that and null checks are probably the only tricky cases?

[Fokko]

@RussellSpitzer I just implemented that part on the PyIceberg side: apache/iceberg-python#1644. It is pretty straightforward :) At PyIceberg, we still fetch the footer, but I don't see any easy ways to skip that.