Iceberg
Apache Iceberg
Judgement: Adopt
Default open table format for new lakes; multi-vendor catalog support and ASF governance.
Open table format for huge analytic datasets — schema evolution, hidden partitioning, time travel, ACID semantics on object storage.
Originated at Netflix; now a default in Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, and most query engines. Increasingly the substrate that other layers (catalogs, lakehouses) build on.
Why it counts as a standard
Iceberg's table-format specification — manifest files, metadata layout, snapshot semantics — is published openly and re-implemented by every major engine: Snowflake, Databricks, Trino, Spark, Dremio, DuckDB. The format itself is the standard; the original Netflix implementation is just one client of it.
At a glance
- Category
- Open Table Formats
- Governance
- Apache Software Foundation
- Status
- Stable; effectively the winner of the table-format race
- First released
- 2017
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Open Table Formats.
See Iceberg in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare Iceberg against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.