Topic
Open table formats such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake and Apache Hudi add schema evolution and snapshots to files in object storage for multi-engine access.
Amazon Web Services added Iceberg materialized views to Redshift, so a result Redshift computes once can be read by Spark and Athena, a dev.to write-up says. Teams that copy shared metrics between engines with ETL jobs can retire those jobs only if the views stay fresh enough for their readers.
Reality
Databricks says it added UNREGISTER to the Apache Iceberg REST catalog spec, so a table can change catalogs with zero files copied. A team can only use it if the catalog it is leaving implements the call, and the post demonstrates it on Unity Catalog.
Reality
Cloudflare made its Data Platform generally available as Basin, three serverless services that ingest, catalog and query Apache Iceberg tables on R2. Outside Iceberg engines read the same tables, so Workers teams can price Basin SQL against a warehouse on identical data.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Apache Iceberg's REST Catalog spec now lets a catalog return per-user row filters and nine column actions for a trusted engine to enforce, Databricks says. Policies that need subqueries or lookup tables do not fit that vocabulary, so the portability covers simple rules running on engines a deployment already trusts.
Reality
Amazon S3 Tables now supports every Apache Iceberg V3 data type after adding four, including geometry, geography and nanosecond timestamps. Telemetry and mapping teams can stop storing event times and coordinates as integers and strings.
Reality
AWS Community Builder Aki argues Apache Iceberg made data portable while permissions, auditing, lineage and sharing stay tied to each catalog. The spec leaves the atomic commit to each catalog, so the catalog is now the choice that is hard to reverse.
Reality
Apache Iceberg's Rust REST client, iceberg-catalog-rest 0.10.1, implements 13 of 25 tested catalog operations and logs in to five of seven catalogs. The two it cannot log in to are AWS Glue and S3 Tables, and reaching them from Rust means a different crate with a different operation set.
Reality
Keeping the Iceberg table format governance-unaware was a deliberate call. That leaves the catalog as the only thing standing on the path of every read. A dev.to guide lists six pieces an operator has to source above it.
Reality
A dev.to post argues that Snowflake-managed Iceberg tables let you keep the managed engine while owning the Parquet in your own bucket. The same post says the catalog stays Snowflake's, and that 50,000-inserts-per-second ingest should not move.
Reality
A GCP walkthrough put Spark, Trino and BigQuery on the same orders table through Google's Iceberg REST catalog. The 409 ConflictException it logged is the part of the demo a production pipeline has to plan for.
Reality
A new Iceberg REST Catalog addition lets the catalog evaluate policy for one principal and return nine column actions plus row filters for a trusted engine to apply, while the spec leaves establishing that trust to the deployment.
Reality