Open standards are rapidly becoming the foundation for scalable business value, driving innovation, momentum and action. With the recent incubation of Apache Polaris, an open-source lakehouse catalog implementation for tracking Apache Iceberg tables, we are moving toward a world where data and its governance are truly portable, writes Alex Merced, Senior Tech Evangelist at Dremio. This means you can use a wide range of data tools without the need to duplicate data and compromise governance.
For years, enterprises relied on proprietary data warehouses like Teradata and Oracle, which, despite their robust performance, created costly vendor lock-ins that constrained innovation and flexibility. As such, moving data or integrating different technologies was not only cumbersome but also costly.
Apache Iceberg – The Disruptor
The rise of data lakes offered a new way of storing data — in its raw form on inexpensive storage. However, data lakes struggled to match traditional data warehouses' performance and management capabilities.
Enter Apache Iceberg, an open table format that enables data warehouse-like tables with all the same ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) guarantees that traditional data warehouses offer. This gives you the performance of data warehouses with the flexibility and lower price point of a data lake – hence, a data lakehouse.
Apache Iceberg’s unique ability to provide features like time travel and schema evolution—once exclusive to expensive, proprietary data warehouses—without locking companies into a single vendor's ecosystem has set it apart. As companies increasingly realise the importance of controlling their data independently, Iceberg’s open-source nature means you can integrate it into your existing data infrastructure without being locked into a particular technology stack. It’s about embracing freedom and flexibility.
Read the full article, via The Stack.
