Who Has the Best Lakehouse Design? A Round Table Discussion.

The Lakehouse hype peaked last year, so now let's get real about what it actually is, who it's for, and which format wins. I'm joined by three people who live and breathe this stuff daily: Alex Monahan (DevRel at MotherDuck, co-author of the upcoming O'Reilly book DuckLake - The Definitive Guide), Jacopo Tagliabue (Co-Founder of Bauplan, a managed service built on Apache Iceberg), and Scott Haines (OSS & Senior Developer Advocate at Databricks, the team behind Delta Lake's enterprise deployment). We cover: - What problem the lakehouse was actually designed to solve - What "no vendor lock-in" really means in 2026 - Apache Iceberg vs. Delta Lake vs. Duck Lake — real architectural tradeoffs, not marketing - What a catalog is and why it matters (and where Duck Lake sidesteps it) - The Databricks acquisition of Tabular and what it means for the ecosystem - Streaming, the small file problem, and where lakehouses fall short - Open source vs. open format — and why they're not the same thing - Whether you should even care about deletion vectors, V3 vs. V4, or any of it Spoiler: Jacopo's take on what data engineers should be spending their time on is the most honest thing said in this episode. This video is sponsored by MotherDuck: https://motherduck.com/ Guests: - Alex Monahan → MotherDuck / DuckLake - Jacopo Tagliabue → Bauplan - Scott Haines → Databricks / Delta Lake My Links: Substack: https://thefulldatastack.substack.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hoytemerson/ X: https://x.com/HoytEmerson My Company: https://www.earlysignal.tech/ Timestamps: 0:00 - The intro 3:17 - The history: from data warehouses to lakehouses 4:41 - What "no vendor lock-in" actually means 11:13 - Why not just use Snowflake? Real lakehouse use cases 14:18 - DuckLake explained: simplicity over scale 19:19 - What is a catalog and why does it matter? 25:34 - "Iceberg is an implementation detail" — Bauplan's philosophy 46:09 - The Tabular acquisition & Delta/Iceberg convergence 57:42 - Should you build on a lakehouse in 2026?