Editor’s note, September 2026. This post was published in December 2022 and some product details have changed since. Dremio Arctic is now Dremio’s Open Catalog, which is built on Apache Polaris rather than Nessie. The screenshots and product names below reflect the interface as it was at the time of writing. For how the current catalog layer works, see Apache Polaris Architecture Explained.
The Apache Iceberg format has taken the data lakehouse world by storm, becoming the keystone pillar of many firms’ data infrastructure. This article shows you how you can connect your Apache Iceberg tables to tools like Tableau so you can generate BI dashboards directly from your Iceberg tables without the need for cubes or extracts. This can be best achieved with Dremio.
Dremio is a data lakehouse platform that enables performant queries on many data lakehouse data sources like Parquet files, Apache Iceberg tables, and even Delta Lake tables. Dremio also integrates with many BI tools making it easy to build dashboards with Dremio using tools like Tableau, Power BI, Superset, Looker, Hex, and many other client tools.
Running this walkthrough: Dremio Cloud is no longer self-serve. To use it, contact the Dremio team about access. To follow along locally instead, run the open source edition from the dremio-oss Docker image.
If you haven’t tried it yet, contact the Dremio team to see many of the features in action before creating your own free account. After your test drive, follow this tutorial to create your own Dremio Cloud account and participate in this hands-on tutorial.
The first step is getting access: contact the Dremio team, or run the open source edition from the dremio-oss Docker image. The process should only take a few minutes. Follow the docs if you have any questions. You can also take a tour through the sign-up process and UI by watching these videos:
(Note: If you use Azure, Google Cloud, or on-prem clusters for your data lake, get started with Dremio Community Edition.)
Once you’ve created a Dremio Sonar and Arctic project, we can get started.
When you first access the dashboard of your Dremio Cloud account you’ll see that you have a “Samples” source already connected with sample data to try out. In there you’ll see a folder called “NYC-taxi-trips-iceberg.” This is a folder on object storage that contains all the data and metadata to be read as an Iceberg table.
You can take the preexisting Iceberg tables in the object storage and “promote” them in Dremio so they will be recognized by Dremio. To do so, just click on the “Format Folder” option which should be available if you hover your cursor to the right.
Select Iceberg and the table is now recognized as an Iceberg table, giving you full access to DML, time-travel, and more.
One of Dremio’s most innovative features is data reflections which can accelerate your queries transparently to sub-second, which makes working with Tableau dashboards a more pleasant experience.
For your existing Iceberg table, turn on aggregate reflections to accelerate aggregate queries, which are precisely the kind of queries your dashboard will rely on. Bring up the dataset on your Dremio dashboard and follow these steps:
This will optimize aggregate queries on the dimensions and measures listed. Feel free to remove any you don’t typically query and add those that you do.
It’s time to connect your data to Tableau now that the queries will be accelerated!
After promoting the dataset you should find yourself in the SQL editor to query the Iceberg table. You can easily load this dataset into Tableau or Power BI using the buttons available in the top right.
When you click on the Tableau button, it will download a “tds” file that will open Tableau and the browser window for SSO authentication. Once you’ve authenticated, you are now able to generate a dashboard from the Iceberg table directly in Tableau, thanks to Dremio.
Now you know how to create BI dashboards directly from your data lake Apache Iceberg tables using Dremio and Tableau. Keep in mind, this connectivity to Tableau is extended to any data source you have access to on your Dremio account which means databases, Parquet tables, Delta Lake tables, and more.
Get a Free Early Release Copy of "Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide".
For a deeper treatment of the topics in this post, download Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide by Tomer Shiran, Jason Hughes, and Alex Merced, free from Dremio.
To see these ideas applied in practice, explore the Dremio documentation.
Deploy agentic analytics directly on Apache Iceberg data with no pipelines and no added overhead.
Editor’s note, September 2026. This post was published in September 2023 and some product details have changed since. Nessie is still available and self-deployable under the Apache-2.0 licence, and it remains the clearest implementation of catalog-level branching. It is not an Apache Software Foundation project, and its development has slowed considerably. For how the current […]
With its capabilities in on-prem to cloud migration, data warehouse offload, data virtualization, upgrading data lakes and lakehouses, and building customer-facing analytics applications, Dremio provides the tools and functionalities to streamline operations and unlock the full potential of data assets.
This is Part 15, the final article of a 15-part Apache Iceberg Masterclass. Part 14 covered hands-on Dremio Cloud. This article covers the three migration strategies and how to execute a zero-downtime migration using the view swap pattern. Most organizations do not start with Iceberg. They have years of data in Hive tables, data warehouses, CSV files, databases, […]
