Seven weeks after taking the wraps off Polaris Catalog at its annual user conference, Snowflake today announced that its metadata catalog for the Apache Iceberg table format is now available on GitHub and as a public preview on its cloud. The data warehousing giant also announced plans to merge Polaris with Project Nessie, a metadata catalog developed by Dremio for Iceberg, thereby helping to nip “catalog sprawl” in the bud.
Snowflake’s unveiling of Polaris at its Data Cloud Summit in early June was a watershed moment for the company, as it marked Snowflake’s full embrace of open data formats and frameworks and a departure from the company’s preference for proprietary big data formats that lock customers in.
While Snowflake’s Iceberg journey had been evolving for two years, the introduction of Polaris solidified the move to open formats, and for the first time gave Snowflake customers the option to run open-source query engines, such as Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Presto, Trino, and Dremio, on their Iceberg data, in addition to continuing to run Snowflake’s proprietary SQL query engine atop data customers store in Snowflake’s proprietary table format.
Read the full article, via Datanami.
