Take the Polar Plunge: A Fearless Introduction to Apache Iceberg®

Track: Practices and other tech

Abstract

New to Apache Iceberg® or just starting to test the waters? Time to take the plunge! In this beginner-friendly session, we’ll introduce you to the core features of this high-performance table format and what it has to offer your data team as you build out your modern data lakehouse.

We’ll start by exploring where Iceberg fits within the context of data warehouses, data lakes, and other data storage formats. From there, you’ll be introduced to some of Iceberg’s key features, like schema evolution, hidden partitioning, and ACID-compliant transactions. You’ll see how these capabilities help to solve real-world challenges in scalability, performance, and data consistency. We won’t stop there, though! Next, we’ll go even deeper beneath the surface and explore the open-source tools, query engines, and catalogs that make up the Iceberg ecosystem. Through an end-to-end demo, you’ll see Iceberg in action and learn how you can leverage its features to streamline your data management and drive better insights.

By the end of the session, you’ll have the foundation you need to get started applying Iceberg to solve your own data challenges. So come along, and we’ll take the polar plunge together!

Danica Fine

Danica began her career as a software engineer in data visualization and warehousing with a business intelligence team where she served as a point-person for standards and best practices in data visualization across her company. In 2018, Danica moved to San Francisco and pivoted to backend engineering with a derivatives data team which was responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that processes millions of financial market data per second in near real-time. Her first project on this team involved Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect. From there, she immersed herself in the world of data streaming and found herself quite at home in the Apache Kafka and Apache Flink communities. She now leads the open source advocacy efforts at Snowflake, supporting Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris (incubating). Outside of work, Danica is passionate about sustainability, increasing diversity in the technical community, and keeping her many houseplants alive. She can be found on X (Bluesky and Mastodon), talking about tech, plants, and baking @TheDanicaFine.