Russell Spitzer

@flyrain could you take a look at this?

> > I think we would also really benefit from @flyrain doing a full review on this as well especially now that we have the "markDelete" pathway as well. I...

Benchmarking could be good, although I'm gonna be real surprised if it's that heavy. I'll take bets on undetectable difference ... I'm assuming all the function calls will end up...

> @manuzhang, it seems reasonable to create a session for the entire rewrite, not just each Spark submission. Is that what was happening before? Yes basically the old behavior would...

@szehon-ho sorry for not getting back to this sooner, let's finish this up when you are back online

Did you set ```TableProperties.UPDATE_MODE, "merge-on-read"``` https://github.com/apache/iceberg/blob/master/spark/v3.2/spark-extensions/src/test/java/org/apache/iceberg/spark/extensions/TestMergeOnReadUpdate.java#L33-L38

> So we could do this, today we throw an error if the table exists, but if force==true, we just call drop table. And clarify in the docs what force...

> > I prefer this approach (I think I said so before :) ) > > Yes fine you win :). Yea the only kind of downside is if we...

@rdblue The issue with those solutions for our use case is that they only work if the current metadata is valid. If not, we cannot drop the table via the...

> @RussellSpitzer, I see what you mean. What about fixing the Hive catalog so that the commit succeeds if table metadata can't be loaded? It sounds like we should have...