How the spec-defined bucket transform lets engines skip the shuffle in joins, and how to set it up and keep it engaged in Spark.
What synthetic data in a lakehouse is for, the generation methods, how to preserve fidelity, and where synthetic tables belong.
What the evidence shows about whether AI replaces data engineers, which parts of the job compress, and which parts do not.
A background agent can move cold Iceberg partitions to cheaper tiers without breaking live queries. Heatmaps, path-safe moves, and restore paths.