Apache Iceberg: What It Is, How It Works, Architecture, Benefits & Use Cases

Apache Iceberg is a popular open table format designed for managing large-scale datasets in data lakes, addressing challenges of maintaining and querying massive datasets by introducing a structure optimized for handling petabytes of data. It offers several key features such as expressive SQL, schema evolution, time travel, hidden partitioning, and data compaction. Its compatibility with popular big data processing engines like Apache Spark, Flink, and Presto makes it versatile for modern data architectures. Key benefits include improved performance, simplified ETL pipelines, increased data reliability, data consistency, schema evolution flexibility, data versioning support, and ample cross-platform compatibility.