Snowflake Apache Iceberg to Support Open Lakehouse Strategies

Snowflake has announced support for Apache Iceberg tables, extending its core capabilities—performance, secure data sharing, and data protection—to one of the most widely adopted open table formats. This integration enables organisations to activate and analyse data faster without data movement, while maintaining open interoperability.

With full support for Apache Iceberg, Snowflake now allows customers to build and scale open lakehouse architectures. This development enables access to data across both open and managed environments, supporting the creation and deployment of advanced analytics and AI-powered applications.

Traditionally, organisations had to choose between fully integrated data platforms or open, interoperable formats like Parquet. Snowflake’s new support eliminates that tradeoff, offering a unified platform where users can store, manage, and analyse data in open formats while benefiting from Snowflake’s platform features. The approach avoids vendor lock-in and offers flexibility and performance to global customers advancing their AI and data strategies. 

“The future of data is open, but it also needs to be easy,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product, Snowflake. “Customers shouldn’t have to choose between open formats and best-in-class performance or business continuity. With Snowflake’s latest Iceberg tables innovations, customers can work with their open data exactly as they would with data stored in the Snowflake platform, all while removing complexity and preserving Snowflake’s enterprise-grade performance and security.”

Snowflake Enhances Iceberg Support to Advance Open Lakehouse Architectures

Snowflake has expanded support for Apache Iceberg tables to accelerate open lakehouse strategies across analytics, security, and data sharing. These enhancements provide customers with a unified approach to managing and analysing data in open formats while maintaining the security, performance, and reliability of Snowflake’s platform.

Lakehouse Analytics with Performance Optimization

Customers can now apply Snowflake’s compute engine and upcoming capabilities such as Search Optimisation Service and Query Acceleration Service (both nearing general availability) to Iceberg tables. With Snowflake-managed Iceberg tables, users benefit from open storage format flexibility without compromising on performance. Snowflake is also working with the Apache Iceberg community to introduce support for VARIANT data types.

Built-In Security, Governance, and Resilience

Snowflake extends its security and governance features to Iceberg tables, allowing organisations to manage open lakehouse environments with secure, intuitive controls. The platform also supports business continuity and disaster recovery through data replication and syncing (currently in private preview), enabling quick recovery from disruptions while supporting open architecture.

Seamless Data Sharing for Iceberg Tables

By extending its secure data-sharing capabilities to Iceberg tables, Snowflake allows customers to access, distribute, and monetise data using the same mechanisms available for native Snowflake tables. This enhances collaboration and supports new data-driven business models in open environments.

Snowflake continues to invest in open standards and open source technologies to support data interoperability. Over the past four years, 35% of its acquisitions have focused on advancing open data ecosystems.

Key open source contributions include:

• Apache Iceberg: Snowflake contributes to Iceberg’s capabilities around schema evolution, partitioning, and transaction management.

• Apache NiFi: Through the acquisition of Datavolo in 2024, Snowflake supports data ingestion and real-time pipeline management.

• Apache Polaris (Incubating): Designed for multi-cloud Iceberg interoperability and enterprise-grade security.

• Modin: Enables scalable pandas workloads without code changes (acquired in 2023).

• Streamlit: Allows the creation of interactive web apps and dashboards (acquired in 2022).

• TruEra: Enhances AI model explainability and performance monitoring (acquired in 2024).

These efforts reflect Snowflake’s continued focus on supporting open, flexible, and secure data platforms for modern enterprise needs.

Customers Views about Snawflake Apache Iceberg

“By running analytics on Apache Iceberg tables with Snowflake, we’ve unlocked flexibility and performance in managing our manufacturing system data at scale. This open architecture allows us to seamlessly analyze vast datasets while maintaining cost efficiency, delivering faster insights to improve manufacturing processes and faster access to critical data for self-service. Snowflake’s support for Iceberg has not only improved our data agility but also reinforced the industry-wide push toward open standards, ensuring that innovation in genomics remains accessible, scalable, and impactful for the entire scientific community.” — Stephen Horn, Staff Data Solutions Architect, Illumina.

“At Komodo Health, our mission is to reduce the global burden of disease through our comprehensive Healthcare Map, platform, tooling, and analytics solutions. Apache Iceberg and open source catalogs like Polaris Catalog have been transformative in helping us create actionable and governed insights from complex healthcare data. Open table formats provide the flexibility, interoperability, and enhanced data governance we need, while Snowflake's unparalleled performance capabilities ensure we can scale these insights effectively with maximum efficiency. Together, this powerful technology foundation empowers us to make healthcare data more accessible and actionable, ultimately improving patient outcomes across the healthcare ecosystem.” — Laurent Bride, CTO, Komodo Health  

 "Innovations like Apache Iceberg are critical for Medidata and drive usability for our products like Clinical Data Studio to help our customers achieve faster, more flexible, and simpler data operations. A unified data layer is the foundation for our AI-powered platform. Open, interoperable data standards, particularly through Snowflake’s robust open catalog, Iceberg tables, and data collaboration technologies, will further advance our data strategy and propel our industry.” — Tom Doyle, CTO, Medidata.

“Data interoperability and flexibility are essential to delivering accurate, real-time insights to our customers. The vendor-neutral design of Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris Catalog ensures we can seamlessly activate diverse data sources without having to copy it or get locked into a single ecosystem.” — Matt Luizzi, Senior Director of Business Analytics, WHOOP

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