The original title is "Apache Data Lakehouse Weekly: July 11 to July 18, 2026"

Short summary

This weekly digest covers 268 messages across six Apache lakehouse dev lists. The headline thread is a formal push to deprecate equality deletes in the Iceberg V4 spec, now viable because Flink's ConvertEqualityDeletes task (merging equality deletes into V3 deletion vectors via RocksDB-backed primary key index) is complete. Parquet voted on a new File logical type, Polaris debated persistence-layer consistency guarantees, and multiple release candidates progressed across Iceberg Rust, Arrow JS/Rust, DataFusion, Ballista, and Comet.

• •Iceberg V4 spec push to remove equality deletes gains traction as Flink deletion-vector conversion lands
• •Parquet closes vote on new File logical type; Polaris debates persistence consistency
• •268 messages across 80 threads: two format votes, five release candidates, one new committer

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