Table Maintenance

Metadata File Cleanup

Lakekeeper honors the Iceberg table properties write.metadata.delete-after-commit.enabled and write.metadata.previous-versions-max. Starting with Lakekeeper v0.10.0, delete-after-commit is enabled by default (it was disabled in earlier versions). On each table commit, when delete-after-commit is enabled, Lakekeeper keeps the current table metadata file plus up to write.metadata.previous-versions-max previous metadata files (default: 100) and deletes the oldest tracked metadata file from the metadata log once that limit is exceeded. This cleanup applies only to metadata files tracked in the metadata log; it does not remove orphaned metadata files.

For example: if write.metadata.previous-versions-max=20, Lakekeeper retains 21 files in total (the current plus 20 previous); committing a 22nd version deletes the oldest tracked metadata file.