In August, we wrote about how in a future where distributed data architectures are inevitable, unifying and managing operational and business metadata is critical to successfully maximizing the value of data, analytics, and AI. One of the most important innovations in data management is open table formats, specifically Apache Iceberg, which fundamentally transforms the way data teams manage operational metadata in the data lake. By maintaining operational metadata within the table itself, Iceberg tables enable interoperability with many different systems and engines.
The Iceberg REST catalog specification is a key component for making Iceberg tables available and discoverable by many different tools and execution engines. It enables easy integration and interaction with Iceberg table metadata via an API and also decouples metadata management from the underlying storage. It is a critical feature for delivering unified access to data in distributed, multi-engine architectures.
That’s why Cloudera added support for the REST catalog: to make open metadata a priority for our customers and to ensure that data teams can truly leverage the best tool for each workload– whether it’s ingestion, reporting, data engineering, or building, training, and deploying AI models.
Snowflake and Cloudera: Better Together
In the spirit of open data and engine freedom, Cloudera is excited to partner with Snowflake to bring the most comprehensive open data lakehouse, and the freedom it provides, to all of our customers.
Snowflake is one of the most popular platforms for data sharing, business intelligence (BI), reporting, and dashboarding due to its ease of use, self-service capabilities, and the performance of its execution engine. Snowflake is a prominent contributor to the Iceberg project, understanding the value it brings to its customers in terms of interoperability, data management, and data governance.
By leveraging Cloudera to build and manage Iceberg tables, Snowflake customers can make a single, consistent, and accurate view of their data available for their BI users without moving or copying data to other systems. They can take advantage of Cloudera’s true hybrid architecture and even provide easy access to on-premises data sources by leveraging Apache Ozone.
They can also leverage a single view of their data for any other Cloudera or third-party engine for other analytic workloads, including streaming, advanced analytics, and AI/ML.
With Snowflake’s engine, Cloudera customers get easy self-service access to their data for BI and interactive dashboards anywhere their data lives, including multiple public clouds and on-premises.
The Cloudera + Snowflake Advantage
The partnership between Cloudera and Snowflake gives several advantages to joint customers:
- Lower Total Cost of Ownership: Reducing data copies and data movement while guaranteeing engine and infrastructure freedom enables customers to reduce storage, compute, and operational costs of maintaining their analytics stack.
- Choose the best tool for the job: By keeping data in open formats, customers can choose the environment and tools that provide the most ideal balance of cost and performance on a workload-by-workload basis. Customers have access to multiple public and private clouds and on-premises data stores, and they can use any engine that can read or write to Iceberg tables.
- True hybrid: Customers have full access to data stores on-premises and in every cloud without undertaking an expensive and complex migration project. They are free to choose the infrastructure best suited for each workload. Cloudera Shared Data Experience (SDX) enables customers to enforce consistent security and governance policies across all of their environments –even if data moves across clouds.
Try Cloudera and Snowflake Today
Together, Cloudera and Snowflake deliver the most comprehensive hybrid open data lakehouse. It enables customers to confidently address virtually any analytic use case, from self-service BI that delivers actionable intelligence to business users to AI that transforms business processes and powers differentiated customer experiences.
Both platforms are free to try today. Try Cloudera’s open data lakehouse on AWS for 5 days for free here, or try Snowflake for free for 30 days here.
