Revolutionize your understanding of modern data management with Apache Polaris (incubating), the open source catalog designed for data lakehouse industry standard Apache Iceberg. This comprehensive guide takes you on a journey through the intricacies of Apache Iceberg data lakehouses, highlighting the pivotal role of Iceberg catalogs. Authors Alex Merced, Andrew Madson, and Tomer Shiran explore Apache Polaris's architecture and features in detail, equipping you with the knowledge needed to leverage its full potential. Data engineers, data architects, data scientists, and data analysts will learn how to seamlessly integrate Apache Polaris with popular data tools like Apache Spark, Snowflake, and Dremio to enhance data management capabilities, optimize workflows, and secure datasets. Get a comprehensive introduction to Iceberg data lakehouses Understand how catalogs facilitate efficient data management and querying in Iceberg Explore Apache Polaris's unique architecture and its powerful features Deploy Apache Polaris locally, and deploy managed Apache Polaris from Snowflake and Dremio Perform basic table operations on Apache Spark, Snowflake, and Dremio

Traditional data architecture patterns are severely limited. To use these patterns, you have to ETL data into each tool—a cost-prohibitive process for making warehouse features available to all of your data. The lack of flexibility with these patterns requires you to lock into a set of priority tools and formats, which creates data silos and data drift. This practical book shows you a better way. Apache Iceberg provides the capabilities, performance, scalability, and savings that fulfill the promise of an open data lakehouse. By following the lessons in this book, you'll be able to achieve interactive, batch, machine learning, and streaming analytics with this high-performance open source format. Authors Tomer Shiran, Jason Hughes, and Alex Merced from Dremio show you how to get started with Iceberg. With this book, you'll learn: The architecture of Apache Iceberg tables What happens under the hood when you perform operations on Iceberg tables How to further optimize Iceberg tables for maximum performance How to use Iceberg with popular data engines such as Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Dremio Discover why Apache Iceberg is a foundational technology for implementing an open data lakehouse.

Project Nessie is an open-source project that provides a Git-like approach to version control for data lakehouse tables. This makes it possible to track data changes over time and revert to previous versions if necessary.

In a lakehouse environment, catalog versioning is essential for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of data. By tracking changes to the catalog, you can ensure that everyone is working with the same data version. This can help to prevent errors and inconsistencies.

Project Nessie can be used to implement catalog versioning in a lakehouse environment. This can be done by creating a Nessie repository for the catalog and then tracking changes to the repository using Git.

This presentation will discuss the benefits of using Project Nessie for catalog versioning in a lakehouse environment. We will also discuss how to implement catalog versioning using Project Nessie.

Summary

Data lakehouse architectures are gaining popularity due to the flexibility and cost effectiveness that they offer. The link that bridges the gap between data lake and warehouse capabilities is the catalog. The primary purpose of the catalog is to inform the query engine of what data exists and where, but the Nessie project aims to go beyond that simple utility. In this episode Alex Merced explains how the branching and merging functionality in Nessie allows you to use the same versioning semantics for your data lakehouse that you are used to from Git.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Dagster offers a new approach to building and running data platforms and data pipelines. It is an open-source, cloud-native orchestrator for the whole development lifecycle, with integrated lineage and observability, a declarative programming model, and best-in-class testability. Your team can get up and running in minutes thanks to Dagster Cloud, an enterprise-class hosted solution that offers serverless and hybrid deployments, enhanced security, and on-demand ephemeral test deployments. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/dagster today to get started. Your first 30 days are free! Data lakes are notoriously complex. For data engineers who battle to build and scale high quality data workflows on the data lake, Starburst powers petabyte-scale SQL analytics fast, at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods, so that you can meet all your data needs ranging from AI to data applications to complete analytics. Trusted by teams of all sizes, including Comcast and Doordash, Starburst is a data lake analytics platform that delivers the adaptability and flexibility a lakehouse ecosystem promises. And Starburst does all of this on an open architecture with first-class support for Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake and Hudi, so you always maintain ownership of your data. Want to see Starburst in action? Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/starburst and get $500 in credits to try Starburst Galaxy today, the easiest and fastest way to get started using Trino. Join us at the top event for the global data community, Data Council Austin. From March 26-28th 2024, we'll play host to hundreds of attendees, 100 top speakers and dozens of startups that are advancing data science, engineering and AI. Data Council attendees are amazing founders, data scientists, lead engineers, CTOs, heads of data, investors and community organizers who are all working together to build the future of data and sharing their insights and learnings through deeply technical talks. As a listener to the Data Engineering Podcast you can get a special discount off regular priced and late bird tickets by using the promo code dataengpod20. Don't miss out on our only event this year! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/data-council and use code dataengpod20 to register today! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Alex Merced, developer advocate at Dremio and co-author of the upcoming book from O'reilly, "Apache Iceberg, The definitive Guide", about Nessie, a git-like versioned catalog for data lakes using Apache Iceberg

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Nessie is and the story behind it? What are the core problems/complexities that Nessie is designed to solve? The closest analogue to Nessie that I've seen in the ecosystem is LakeFS. What are the features that would lead someone to choose one or the other for a given use case? Why would someone choose Nessie over native table-level branching in the Apache Iceberg spec? How do the versioning capabilities compare to/augment the data versioning in Iceberg? What are some of the sources of, and challenges in resolving, merge conflicts between table branches? Can you describe the architecture of Nessie? How have the design and goals of the project changed since it was first created? What is involved