Basin Catalog, Basin - R2 Data Catalog compaction now optimizes manifest files

<p><a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/basin-catalog/">R2 Data Catalog</a>, a managed <a href="https://iceberg.apache.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Apache Iceberg<span class="external-link"> ↗︎</span></a> catalog built into R2, now automatically optimizes manifest files as part of <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/basin-catalog/table-maintenance/">compaction</a>.</p> <p>Manifest files track the data files that make up an Iceberg table. As a table accumulates many small or fragmented manifests, query engines must read more metadata during query planning, which slows down queries even before any data is scanned.</p> <p>When compaction runs, R2 Data Catalog now rewrites and clusters manifest files by partition as a best-effort pre-step. This consolidates fragmented manifests, reduces the number of manifests a query engine must open, and lowers metadata I/O overhead. Tables that are already well-clustered are skipped, so the operation only runs when it provides a benefit.</p> <p>This happens automatically for tables with compaction enabled — no configuration changes are required.</p> <p>For more information, refer to <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/basin-catalog/table-maintenance/">Table maintenance</a>.</p>