June 8, 2026: Apache Iceberg™ tables: Partitioned writes with a hierarchical path layout (General availability)¶

Partitioned writes with a hierarchical path layout for Apache Iceberg™ tables are now generally available.

With this feature, Snowflake writes data to partitioned Iceberg tables by using a hierarchical (Hive-style) directory path layout, where each partition column is represented as a directory level under the data/ directory.

This release includes the following updates:

• You can now use the ALTER ICEBERG TABLE command to set PATH_LAYOUT for an existing table.
• Positional delete files are written into the same directory as the corresponding data file.
• Puffin files containing deletion vectors are always written into the table data/ directory.

For more information, see Partitioning with hierarchical paths.