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The table isn't getting any bigger, but the same query takes longer every single week.
What you'll have at the end
The files metadata table checked, manifests rewritten, and the same query timed again before and after
You need
A lakehouse table fed by frequent small commits, such as a pipeline landing a fresh batch of changed rows every few minutes, that has built up hundreds of manifest files over time, plus a query against that table you can re-run and time.
Not covered
Compacting undersized data files or setting a snapshot expiration policy, both separate maintenance operations; this recipe only reorganizes the manifest layer that indexes the files already there.
Leans on
Copy-on-write or merge-on-read: pick the write mode for a table with constant updates
if it's small delete files piling up rather than ordinary append manifests, the write mode behind that pile is the thing to check next
Set a snapshot expiration policy before old versions eat your storage bill
a rewrite leaves the old manifests behind under the snapshots that referenced them, so pair this with a retention policy or that storage never actually shrinks
Checked 26 Aug 2026
Part of the Data Lakehouse cookbook