Alex Merced's Data, Dev and AI Blog

Topic

Apache Polaris

29 posts tagged “Apache Polaris”.

  1. 30 min read

    How Apache Polaris Plans to Share Iceberg Tables Across Organizations

    A retailer wants to give a supplier live access to three sales tables. Nothing else. The supplier runs its own query engine in its own cloud account.…

  2. 30 min read

    Keeping Lakehouse Traffic Off the Public Internet With Apache Polaris

    A bank's security team reviews its new lakehouse design. Apache Polaris serves as the Iceberg REST catalog. Query engines run in private subnets. The…

  3. 31 min read

    Running Apache Polaris in Production

    The Polaris quickstart takes about four minutes. Pull a container, hit the OAuth endpoint, create a catalog, point Spark at it, write a table. It…

  4. 30 min read

    Running an Iceberg Lakehouse on Kubernetes

    A team moves their lakehouse onto Kubernetes because everything else already runs there. The catalog goes into a Deployment, Spark jobs run through…

  5. 31 min read

    The 2026 Iceberg REST Catalog Compatibility Report

    Every lakehouse vendor now ships an Apache Iceberg REST catalog. Every one of them says it implements the same specification. Then you point…

  6. 30 min read

    How Iceberg Catalogs Hand Engines Storage Access

    Look at how most lakehouses were wired in 2023. Spark had an IAM role with read and write on the whole data bucket. Trino had another one. The Python…

  7. 31 min read

    The Open Lakehouse Explained, Then Built on Your Laptop with Dremio and MinIO

    Most people learn the open lakehouse backwards. They read five vendor pages, collect a stack of Apache project names, and still cannot answer a basic…

  8. 30 min read

    Apache Ossie and Apache Polaris: Putting Semantic Models in the Open Catalog

    Ask four systems in the same company what "monthly active users" means and you get four answers. The BI tool counts distinct user IDs with at least…

  9. 33 min read

    Governance-as-Code for the Lakehouse: Managing REST Catalog RBAC and Masking in Git

    A security audit asks a simple question: who can read the customers.pii table, and when was that last changed? The data platform team opens four…

  10. 31 min read

    Multi-Cloud REST Catalog Topologies: Running Apache Polaris Across AWS, Azure, and GCP

    A global company has analytics data in three places. Its retail arm runs on AWS in Virginia and Frankfurt. An acquisition brought a Google Cloud…

  11. 30 min read

    The Decoupled Data Lakehouse: Multi-Engine Freedom with Open REST Catalogs

    Every few years a data team discovers, mid-contract-renewal, exactly how much of their platform they do not control. The data sits in the vendor's…

  12. 20 min read

    The Five Layers of an Agentic Lakehouse and Where the MCP Server Sits

    Someone on your team connects an AI desktop client to a query engine, asks a question about last quarter, and gets an answer in fifteen seconds. It…

  13. 20 min read

    Why Agentic AI Needs a Governed Semantic Layer Behind the Model Context Protocol

    An executive asks an AI assistant what revenue looked like last quarter. The assistant writes SQL against the warehouse, sums an amount column, and…

  14. 20 min read

    Cross-Cloud Credential Vending in Apache Polaris and the End of Permanent Storage Keys

    Pull up the configuration for any Spark cluster that reads a data lake and look for the storage credentials. In most organizations you find an IAM…

  15. 20 min read

    How the Iceberg REST Catalog Turned Into the Lakehouse Control Plane

    A dbt run updates a fact table and two dimension tables. The fact table commit succeeds. The second dimension commit fails on a conflict. For the…

  16. 31 min read

    Apache Polaris 1.7.0 and the Quiet Work of Making a Catalog Trustworthy

    A Spark job commits a table update. The catalog writes the change to Postgres. Then the network drops between the catalog and the client, and the…

  17. 30 min read

    Wiring an AI Agent to Apache Polaris with the Model Context Protocol

    An engineer opens Cursor, types "what tables do we have in the sales namespace, and which ones have a customerid column," and gets an answer in four…

  18. 31 min read

    Governing Iceberg Tables Across Regions Without Three Sets of Permissions

    An engineer needs to join sales data in eu-west-1 with product data in us-east-1. The sales tables live in a Polaris instance the European team runs.…

  19. 31 min read

    The Breakdown of the Open Lakehouse in 2026: Iceberg, Arrow, Polaris, Parquet, and Ossie, and How to Actually Build One

    If you have followed the data world for the past few years, you have heard the phrase "open lakehouse" often enough that it may have started to sound…

  20. 17 min read

    Apache Polaris and Multi-Engine Iceberg Catalogs

    Apache Iceberg solved a hard problem: it gave analytics teams a table format that multiple engines can read and write without corrupting each other's…

  21. 29 min read

    The State of Apache Polaris in July 2026: From Incubating Catalog to the Governance Layer of the Open Lakehouse

    I have a personal stake in this one, so let me declare it up front. Apache Polaris was co-created by Snowflake and Dremio, I work at Dremio, and I…

  22. 15 min read

    Multi-Engine Catalog Federation with Apache Polaris: Syncing Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure Metadata

    Open table formats changed the data lakehouse conversation, but they did not finish it. A table can be stored in an open format and still be hard to…

  23. 15 min read

    Unity AI Gateway vs Apache Polaris Control Planes

    The right comparison is not vendor scoreboard. It is closed AI governance gateway versus open catalog control plane. For enterprise architects…

  24. 7 min read

    2025 Year in Review Apache Iceberg, Polaris, Parquet, and Arrow

    A look back at key developments in Apache Iceberg, Polaris, Parquet, and Arrow in 2025.

  25. 19 min read

    Comprehensive Hands-on Walk Through of Dremio Cloud Next Gen (Hands-on with Free Trial)

    Walkthrough with the new trial of the Dremio Cloud Platform

  26. 8 min read

    2025-2026 Guide to Learning about Apache Iceberg, Data Lakehouse & Agentic AI

    A curated guide to mastering Apache Iceberg, data lakehouse architectures, and the emerging field of Agentic AI for data professionals.

  27. 19 min read

    An Exploration of the Commercial Iceberg Catalog Ecosystem

    Dive into the world of commercial Iceberg catalogs and discover how they enhance data lakehouse architectures for modern data engineering.

  28. 13 min read

    Building a Universal Lakehouse Catalog - Beyond Iceberg Tables

    Exploring paths to a universal lakehouse catalog that supports multiple data formats and engines, building on Apache Iceberg's success.

  29. 25 min read

    Intro to Apache Iceberg with Apache Polaris and Apache Spark

    Learn how to leverage Apache Iceberg with Apache Polaris and Apache Spark to build scalable and efficient data lakehouses.

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