Add `delete_files`

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
50/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
python
Domain
data-engineering

Research direction

Start with PyIceberg’s existing Add Files API and compare its behavior with the linked Java DeleteFiles and OverwriteFiles APIs. Define the supported delete_files or overwrite semantics and verify that the completed feature lets callers remove or replace existing data files without creating duplicates.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Feature Request / Improvement

Hello All,

First of all, apologies as I am not very experienced with PyIceberg.

I currently have a Java application that "manually" updates table metadata and can add new files if they don't exist and replace older files if they already do. This guarantees that, as long as the file names are fixed, I should not have duplicates.

In Java, I use deleteFile and then addFile.

In PyIceberg, I can Add Files, but I don't see options to "Delete Files" or overwrite.

Is delete_files() a feature that you could add?

Dominant language
Python
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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