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A customer's Delta table has 4 million small files and every query crawls. What happened, and how do you fix it?

The small-files problem is the #1 self-inflicted lakehouse wound FDEs find in the field. The causes are always the same three things, and the fix has a prevention half most candidates forget.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.

The small-files problem is the #1 self-inflicted lakehouse wound FDEs find in the field. The causes are always the same three things, and the fix has a prevention half most candidates forget.

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UP NEXT ON YOUR JOURNEY

Next in this trackDesign a star schema for a ride-sharing company's analytics.Next in this trackImplement Slowly Changing Dimension Type 2, keep full history when a customer's attributes change.Next in this trackLakehouse vs data warehouse, and what does ACID on a data lake actually buy you?

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