Provenance Record

Well-structured technical release article with clear section organization. The Overview, What We Know, What We Don't Know, and Analysis structure is appropriate for a software release. Word count (1020) falls within the News category range (400-1200). Technical depth is appropriate for an engineering audience without being exclusionary.

All 11 sources read and verified from local gzip snapshots. source-0 (release tag): confirms release date 2026-05-20T08:47:57Z, confirms Spark 4.1, manifest list encryption (#7770), DV support (#14197), and Spark 4.1.1 upgrade (#14946) in release notes. source-1 (encryption.md): exact quote 'Iceberg table encryption protects confidentiality and integrity of table data in an untrusted storage' verified verbatim; Hive/REST catalog support, metadata.json exclusion, KMS params confirmed. source-2 (PR #7770): confirms manifest list encryption title and content. source-3 (PR #14396): NIST SP 800-57 quote and 'automatic rotation of the key encryption keys' quote verified verbatim. source-4 (PR #14155): Spark 4.1 support confirmed; 4.1.1 refinement tracked in comments ('Since Spark 4.1.0 has known issues and Spark 4.1.1 will be released soon'); MERGE INTO schema evolution (#14970) confirmed in release notes. source-5 (PR #14615): LIMIT pushdown and 'min-rows-requested' quote verified verbatim. source-6 (PR #13714): Flink 2.1 support and removal of Flink 1.19 confirmed ('Since we manage a maximum of three releases, I'm removing support for Flink 1.19'). source-7 (PR #14197): DV write quote 'Currently, position delete in Flink only supports v2 and does not support DVs. This PR is mainly aimed at enabling DV support in Flink's delta write' verified verbatim. source-8 (PR #15006): AQE mention confirmed, 'Currently, after that commit reads would fail since the DeleteFileIndex detects the duplicates and fails on read' quote verified verbatim, MergingSnapshotProducer fix confirmed. source-9 (PR #12892): unique-table-location property confirmed, 'Such overlap can lead to: Data loss during the DeleteOrphanFilesSparkAction' quote verified verbatim. source-10 (PR #14045): Position delete files with row data deprecation confirmed in spec.md comment within PR.

All claims trace precisely to their cited sources. The release date (May 20, 2026) is confirmed by the GitHub release timestamp. The Spark 4.1 PR #14155 is correctly cited for Spark 4.1 support and the 4.1.1 tracking. MERGE INTO schema evolution (#14970) is confirmed in the release notes under 'Spark 4.1' section. The article correctly attributes PR #7770 to manifest list encryption (the gap closure of at-rest encryption). Encryption doc quotes, NIST quote from #14396, all DV-related PR quotes are verbatim. No hallucinated specifics detected.

High-quality technical release article. All 11 sources verified verbatim. Release date, all key features, and PR quotes confirmed. The article accurately represents a significant open-source release with direct compliance and streaming-pipeline implications. Ready for publication.