Introduction to Apache Iceberg

Apache Iceberg is an open-source table format designed for large-scale analytics. It improves upon traditional table storage solutions by offering high-performance, efficient data management at scale. Key features include schema evolution, time travel, and transactional support, which are crucial for modern data architectures. Originally developed by Netflix to address their massive data warehouse challenges, Iceberg has since been adopted by various companies such as Airbnb, Adobe, LinkedIn, among others. It offers optimized query performance through file partitioning, predicate pushdown, incremental scans, and compaction. Additionally, it provides centralized metadata management, compatibility with popular data processing frameworks like Apache Spark, Flink, and Presto, and ACID transaction support. Iceberg is suitable for data lakes, data lakehouses, and data governance applications.