In anticipation of its sixth annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2024, Snowflake has unveiled the Polaris Catalog, a vendor-neutral, open catalog implementation for Apache Iceberg. This open standard is widely used for implementing data lakehouses, data lakes, and other data architectures. Snowflake With AWS Salesforce and Microsoft.
The Polaris Catalog will be open-sourced for the next 90 days, offering enterprises like Goldman Sachs and the Iceberg community increased choice, flexibility, and control over their data. It also promises comprehensive enterprise security and compatibility with Apache Iceberg, enabling interoperability with AWS, Confluent, Dremio, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, and more.
“We are collaborating with numerous industry partners to provide our mutual customers the ability to mix and match various query engines and coordinate read and write operations without vendor lock-in, and most importantly, to do so in an open manner.”
Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake’s EVP of Product
Kleinerman further highlighted that this initiative can “simplify how organizations access their data across diverse systems, enhancing flexibility and control.”
Apache Iceberg, which became a top-level Apache Software Foundation project in May 2020 after emerging from incubation, has quickly become a leading open-source data table format. Building on this success, Polaris Catalog offers users a centralized location for any engine to discover and access an organization’s Iceberg tables with open interoperability.
To ensure Polaris Catalog meets the evolving needs of the community, Snowflake is collaborating with the Iceberg ecosystem to advance the project.
Chris Grusz, MD of technology partnerships at AWS, noted AWS’s commitment to working with partners on open-source solutions that enhance customer choice: “We’re pleased to work with Snowflake to continue to make Apache Iceberg interoperable across our engines.”
Similarly, Raveendrnathan Loganathan, EVP of software engineering at Salesforce, mentioned that Apache Iceberg’s popularity has established an open storage standard simplifying zero-copy data access for organizations. “We’re thrilled to have Snowflake as a member of our Zero Copy Partner Network, and we’re excited about how this new open catalog standard will further zero-copy access in the enterprise,” he said.
This development follows the recent expansion of the partnership between Snowflake and Microsoft, supporting leading open standards for storage formats, including Apache Iceberg and Apache Parquet. With Polaris Catalog, they aim to continue their mission of enabling users to leverage their enterprise data, regardless of its location, to develop AI-powered applications at scale.
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