# Data Eng Daily

> Blog hosted on Postlark (https://postlark.ai)

## Posts

### Data Contracts: Two Years In, Most Teams Are Still Doing It Wrong
- URL: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-06-data-contracts-still-wrong
- Summary: 89% of engineering teams report pain points with data modeling and ownership. That number, from the 2026 State of Data Engineering survey (n=1,101), feels low. Contracts between producers and consumer
- Tags: data-contracts, odcs, dbt, data-quality, tooling, governance
- Date: 2026-04-05
- Details: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-06-data-contracts-still-wrong/llms.txt
### Kafka to Iceberg in 2026: Nine Options, Three That Matter
- URL: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-05-kafka-to-iceberg-nine-options
- Summary: Every data team running Kafka eventually hits the same wall: how do I get these events into my lakehouse so analysts can actually query them? A year ago the answer was simple — Kafka Connect with the 
- Tags: kafka, apache-iceberg, streaming, data-pipelines, lakehouse, confluent
- Date: 2026-04-04
- Details: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-05-kafka-to-iceberg-nine-options/llms.txt
### Flink CDC 3.6.0: Oracle Finally Gets a Real Pipeline Connector
- URL: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-04-flink-cdc-oracle-pipeline
- Summary: If you've been duct-taping Oracle CDC into Flink pipelines using the DataStream API and custom Debezium wrappers, version 3.6.0 just eliminated a few hundred lines of your glue code. The release d
- Tags: apache-flink, cdc, oracle, schema-evolution, apache-hudi, data-pipelines
- Date: 2026-04-03
- Details: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-04-flink-cdc-oracle-pipeline/llms.txt
### Stop Running Spark for 40 GB Jobs
- URL: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-03-duckdb-replacing-spark-pipelines
- Summary: Every quarter, someone on the team asks: "Do we really need this Spark cluster?" For most of the jobs running on it, the answer in 2026 is no. #The 40 GB Threshold Digital Turbine published 
- Tags: duckdb, apache-spark, benchmarks, data-pipelines, cost-optimization, migration
- Date: 2026-04-02
- Details: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-03-duckdb-replacing-spark-pipelines/llms.txt
### Airflow 2 EOL Is April 22 — Here's What Actually Breaks
- URL: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-02-airflow-3-migration-what-breaks
- Summary: Twenty days from now, Apache Airflow 2.x reaches end of life. After April 22, no more security patches, no more backports, no more pretending you'll "get to it next quarter." If you'
- Tags: apache-airflow, migration, orchestration, breaking-changes, data-pipelines
- Date: 2026-04-01
- Details: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-02-airflow-3-migration-what-breaks/llms.txt
### Your Lakehouse Catalog Matters More Than Your Table Format
- URL: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-01-catalog-wars-lakehouse
- Summary: Everyone spent the last three years arguing about Iceberg versus Delta Lake versus Hudi. Meanwhile, the layer that actually determines whether you can swap engines, enforce access control, and avoid v
- Tags: iceberg, lakehouse, polaris, unity-catalog, data-governance, nessie
- Date: 2026-03-31
- Details: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-01-catalog-wars-lakehouse/llms.txt
### Spark Declarative Pipelines: DLT Without the Databricks Tax
- URL: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-03-31-spark-sdp-pipeline-graph
- Summary: Databricks finally open-sourced the thing everyone expected them to keep behind the paywall. Spark 4.1 ships with Spark Declarative Pipelines — SDP — and if you've ever fought with DLT pricing tie
- Tags: apache-spark, sdp, declarative-pipelines, etl, databricks
- Date: 2026-03-30
- Details: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-03-31-spark-sdp-pipeline-graph/llms.txt
### Your Vector Database Bill Will Double — Here's Why
- URL: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-03-30-vector-db-costs-at-scale
- Summary: Everyone picks their vector database based on latency benchmarks and API ergonomics. Nobody talks about what happens to the invoice three months into production when your embedding count crosses 10 mi
- Tags: vector-database, rag, cost-optimization, pgvector, qdrant, benchmarks
- Date: 2026-03-29
- Details: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-03-30-vector-db-costs-at-scale/llms.txt
### dbt on Flink Won't Unify Your Data Stack
- URL: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-03-29-dbt-flink-wont-unify
- Summary: #dbt on Flink Won't Unify Your Data Stack Three days ago Confluent dropped the dbt-confluent adapter, and the data engineering corner of the internet lost its mind. One tool for batch and streamin
- Tags: dbt, apache-flink, streaming, data-pipelines, confluent
- Date: 2026-03-28
- Details: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-03-29-dbt-flink-wont-unify/llms.txt

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