Why We Moved from Hive-Style Data Lakes to Apache Iceberg? (12 minute read) (opens in new tab)

Moving from a Hive-style partitioned data lake (Parquet files on S3 + AWS Glue Catalog) to Apache Iceberg after AWS strengthened its ecosystem support (including S3 Tables) solved long-standing pain points with Hive-style architectures. Iceberg enables efficient pruning, seamless schema and partition evolution, time travel, and better query planning performance.