Speaker:

Prashant Singh

Date:

Mon Dec 1, 2025 @ 04:30pm EDT

Date:

Mon Dec 1, 2025

Time:

04:30pm EDT

Location:

https://cmu.zoom.us/j/96274590594?pwd=ZIhPZi8CFwaVd5kN9sS5uEiuWanTCa.1Zoom

Title:

From Storage Formats to Open Governance: The Evolution to Apache Polaris

System:

Polaris

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Talk Info:

As organizations build their data lakehouses on Apache Iceberg, the primary challenge shifts from managing individual files to orchestrating a cohesive ecosystem of tables. How can you guarantee consistency and enable complex operations when multiple data engines—like Spark, Trino, and Flink—need to interact with the same data concurrently?

The answer lies in a standardized service layer, defined by the Iceberg REST Catalog specification. This talk explores how this open API acts as the blueprint for true interoperability, enabling smarter multi-writer conflict resolution and unlocking powerful new capabilities, such as enabling complex multi-statement and multi-table transactions.

We then introduce Apache Polaris, a complete, open-source implementation that brings this vision of open governance to life. We'll demonstrate how Polaris moves beyond basic metadata management to provide a robust, centralized control plane. Join us to learn how Polaris delivers essential features like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), integration with external Identity Providers, and intelligent conflict resolution, policy management establishing itself as the central nervous system for a secure, multi-engine, and transactionally-consistent Iceberg data lakehouse.

This talk is part of the Future Data Systems Seminar Series.

Bio:

Prashant is a Senior Software Engineer @ Snowflake, Committer @ Apache Iceberg™, Apache Polaris™ (incubating) and is an active contributor to both the projects.