And yeah these days you can boost a single machine to enormous specifications. I guess the main difference will be the cost. A distributed engine can "lease" a little bit of time here and there, while a single RAM engine needs to keep all that capacity ready for when it is actually needed.
One thing to add to this:
Snapshots can be retained (though rewritten) even through compaction
As a consequence of compaction, when deleting the build up of many small add/delete files, in a format like Iceberg, you would lose the ability to time travel to those earlier states.
With DuckLake's ability to refer to parts of parquet files, we can preserve the ability to time travel, even after deleting the old parquet files
Does this trick preclude the ability to sort your data within a partition? You wouldn’t be able to rely on the row IDs being sequential anymore to be able to just refer to a prefix of them within a newly created file.
