The promise of a lakehouse rests on a simple, powerful idea: multiple engines, one source of truth. But that promise fractures the moment two tools disagree on what a table is even called. Maninder Parmar's article gets to the heart of this fragility, and the conclusion is unavoidable: naming rules are not a minor administrative detail but a core architectural contract. If your SQL engine resolves identifiers differently than your catalog expects, you do not have a data platform; you have a collection of well-intentioned silos that happen to share storage.
For practitioners, this means the real work is not in selecting the open table format but in enforcing discipline around it. Iceberg and its peers give you the freedom to mix engines, but that freedom is conditional. A table created with lowercase, quoted names in one engine may become invisible to another that normalizes identifiers to uppercase. A catalog that allows hyphens while your query engine treats them as subtraction operators is a landmine waiting for the next deployment. Cross-engine validation is not theoretical caution; it is the difference between a pipeline that flows and one that silently breaks at 2 a.m. when a new job spins up.
The practical takeaway is that you need a governance layer that treats naming conventions as part of your schema design, not as an afterthought. This means establishing rules for case sensitivity, quoting, and special characters before you write your first table, and then automating checks to enforce those rules across every engine in your estate. Do not assume that because a format is open, the behavior is uniform. It is not. And the cost of discovering that is measured in failed queries, duplicated data, and the slow erosion of trust in the platform.
So, here is the concrete point: if you are building a lakehouse, add a CI step that validates SQL identifier resolution and catalog names across every engine you support. Treat a naming mismatch as a release-blocking bug, not a support ticket. Because in a multi-engine world, your conventions are the only thing holding the system together. Make them explicit, test them continuously, and you will keep the data flowing. Ignore them, and the lakehouse becomes just another place where data goes to get stuck.