Lake Release Note 2026-08-15

The first working stack: make up brings up storage, catalog, and both clients, and make smoke writes and reads an Iceberg table end to end.

• The stack — MinIO for objects, Postgres 17 for catalog metadata, Lakekeeper v0.13.1 as the Iceberg REST catalog, DuckDB v1.5.5 as the query engine, wired by one compose file. Images are pinned in the parent repository under Dockerfiles/lakehouse-*.
• Credential vending, not shared secrets. Lakekeeper hands DuckDB short-lived MinIO STS credentials per table access, so no client holds an S3 secret. minio-init creates a dedicated lakekeeper user for this because MinIO refuses AssumeRole for root credentials.
• Idempotent bring-up. make up re-runs provisioning and bootstrap on every invocation and converges, so it is safe to repeat against a live stack.
• One command surface, two front ends. scripts/console/nqlake.py prints tables on a TTY and JSON when piped, so the same commands serve humans, scripts, and the Next.js console's API routes.
• load infers schemas. CSV/TSV/Parquet/JSON(L), optionally gzipped; the first load creates the namespace and table, later loads append by column name, --replace rebuilds.
• Data lives in images/ as bind mounts and survives make down. Only make clean deletes it.