Apache Iceberg is an open-source high-performance format for huge analytictables. Iceberg enables the use of SQL tables for big data while making it possible for engines like Spark, Trino, Flink, Presto, Hive, Impala, StarRocks, Doris, and Pig to safely work with the same tables, at the same time.[1] Iceberg is released under the Apache License.[2] Iceberg addresses the performance and usability challenges of using Apache Hive tables in large and demanding data lake environments.[3] Vendors currently supporting Apache Iceberg tables in their products include CelerData, Cloudera, Dremio, IOMETE, Snowflake, Starburst, Tabular,[4] and AWS.[5]
Iceberg was started at Netflix by Ryan Blue and Dan Weeks. Hive was used by many different services and engines in the Netflix infrastructure. Hive was never able to guarantee correctness and did not provide stable atomic transactions.[3] Many at Netflix avoided using these services and making changes to the data to avert unintended consequences from the Hive format.[3] Ryan Blue set out to address three issues that faced the Hive table by creating Iceberg:[3]
Ensure the correctness of the data and support ACID transactions.
Improve performance by enabling finer-grained operations to be done at the file granularity for optimal writes.
Simplify and obfuscate[citation needed] general operation and maintenance of tables.
Iceberg development started in 2017.[6] The project was open-sourced and donated to the Apache Software Foundation in November 2018.[7] In May 2020, the Iceberg project graduated to become a top-level Apache project.[7]
