A Deep Dive into Polaris: Simplifying Iceberg Catalog Management

Last week, we explored Snowflake's native Managed Iceberg Tables and their limitations. In June, Snowflake announced Polaris, an Apache incubated Iceberg Catalog that provides better compatibility across data consumers. Polaris is available as a hosted service for Snowflake customers or as open-source software for self-hosting. It offers access control layers to manage resources and supports catalogs of different types: internal (managed by Polaris) and external (managed by other Iceberg providers). The core concepts in Polaris include Catalog, Roles, and additional features like Access-Delegation. Setting up an External Catalog with Snowflake Managed Tables requires a few extra steps, while setting up an Internal Catalog is ready to go. Polaris's REST API implementation increases compatibility across platforms like Spark and PyIceberg, but its favoritism towards Snowflake remains to be seen.