Apache Iceberg provides an open table format for interoperability across data lakes, showing the importance of a true open standard.
Credit: Olga Gavrilova / Shutterstock
Enterprises have come to view their data as a vital asset, and like other vital assets, they want control over that data to extract its maximum value. That means having the ability to leverage the multitude of tools and frameworks that have emerged in recent years to support AI and analytics, and that requires standards that are truly open.
A lot of enterprise data now lives in data lakes, which are ideal for storing vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. Data lakes provide organizations with a comprehensive way to explore, refine, and analyze petabytes of information that may be arriving constantly from multiple sources.
But data lakes that depend on proprietary formats make it impossible — or at least cost-prohibitive — to share and access data across different platforms and tools. Large enterprises often use multiple data platforms …