SAN FRANCISCO – Dremio, an Agentic Lakehouse company, today highlighted its leadership in the entire Apache Iceberg ecosystem, including V3 support now available in Dremio Cloud, the election of Dremio developer JB Onofre to the board of the Apache Software Foundation, and continued momentum behind Apache Polaris. A long-time advocate of open source collaboration and the elimination of vendor lock-in, Dremio has made core contributions to projects including Apache Arrow (creator and lead contributor), Apache Iceberg (lead contributor and educator), and Apache Polaris (co-creator). Reinforcing this commitment, JB Onofre, who shepherds Polaris through incubation, has been appointed to the board of the Apache Software Foundation.
Iceberg V3 is designed to support diverse and complex data types, provide greater control over schema evolution, and deliver performance enhancements for large-scale, high-currency areas. Dremio’s V3 integration advances centralized data management, row-level changes, and schema evolution, with full support for Dremio Cloud, including the VARIANT JSON data type, fast CDC wipe vectors (change data capture), and enhanced schema evolution.
“The Iceberg lakehouse has become the default structure for AI and analytics,” said Rahim Bhojani, Dremio’s CTO. “Many platforms have added Iceberg as a feature, but Dremio is built on it from the ground up. Capabilities like Autonomous Reflections, Iceberg Clustering, and now the combination of V3 and each other, deliver the fastest and easiest Iceberg platform to manage.”
Dremio continues to rate Apache Iceberg by saying:
- Apache Iceberg V3 support: Dremio brings full read and write support for the latest Iceberg specification. Removing vectors speeds up line-level performance in CDC and streaming workloads. The VARIANT type removes the schema-on-write bottleneck for partially structured data. Line-level inventory provides built-in creation and update tracking for regulated industries with no additional tools required.
- Iceberg’s Arrow-Based SQL Engine: Dremio’s query engine is built natively on Apache Arrow, a standard open source co-developed by Dremio, making it uniquely suited to Iceberg’s workload. It processes Iceberg and Parquet data in vectorized batches without conversion to a proprietary format, delivering fast, intuitive analysis without lock-in.
- Autonomous Reflections: Dremio removes the management of the Iceberg lakehouse. Autonomous Reflections recognizes query patterns and automatically creates, refreshes, and retracts virtualizations, speeding queries from seconds to subseconds without code changes or manual tuning. Incremental refresh of reflections keeps data fresh at low resource cost.
- Iceberg Clustering: uses Z-order to combine data in multiple columns at once. Two-level pruning that skips data at both the manifest and rowgroup level, reduces I/O by continuously working on petabyte-scale tables without full table rewrites. Automatic table maintenance: compression, snapshot expiration, and orphan file cleanup are performed on policy-based schedules without manual intervention, keeping tables running and maintenance costs. It enables developers to focus on building data products, not maintaining tables.
- Open Catalog (Powered by Apache Polaris): Dremio founded Apache Polaris, an open Iceberg catalog standard that has now graduated to the top-level Apache project. Built on Polaris, Dremio’s Open Catalog provides an Iceberg catalog that supports full reading and writing from any REST-compliant engine, including Spark, Flink, Trino, and DuckDB, all of which share the same Iceberg tables. Governance, including RBAC, row-level filters, column hiding, and timely data transactions, is consistently enforced at the catalog layer regardless of the query engine. All tables hosted by Dremio are accessible on any Iceberg compatible engine.
- Import and conversion: Dremio supports the full range of DML operations on Iceberg tables using standard SQL. Continuous import with CREATE PIPE, batch loading with COPY INTO, and dbt Core integration make Dremio the perfect platform for building and maintaining Iceberg data pipelines.
Learn more about Dremio’s Iceberg capabilities at
